Ghost Riders
by The Ferryman
Summary: In the aftermath of the most devastating war in history, a mixed force including the last descendants of some of Earth's most ancient military units vanishes without a trace. More than two centuries later it reappears above an agri-world named Planting.
1. Chapter 1

Disclaimer: I do not own Battletech, _Bun Bun,_ or anything else you might find familiar.

_I always get the shakes before a drop_.

I don't remember where I read it, but it fit me to a 'T'. Oh I've done all the stuff that soldiers have done since before Athens ruled the waves. I got a good night's sleep, had a hearty meal, invoked my Gods of choice, inspected my personal kit just in case I have to bail and then inspected my 'mech too even though my tech already did—Cally is the best tech in the fleet (her service records say so) but it's my neck on the line, see? And then I've done the stuff that they didn't have millennia ago but probably would have done if they had: carbo-loading and hypno-prep and inoculations a-plenty. The Surgeons have studied my brainwaves and asked me silly questions—when you're being trusted with a war machine capable of devastating a city you have to put up with some silly shit on the part of those doing the trusting—and they all tell me that I can't really be afraid. That the shakes are just a little pre-engagement jitters that burn off some nervous energy…which is utter bullshit because I'm scared silly every time. Frankly, I think there's something wrong with those who aren't. But of all the bad drops—and there are some _really_ bad ones—delayed stealth insertions are the worst.

Consider this: while your other buddies are heading for dirt in a show of light and thunder—provided by engines trying to keep dropships from going 'splat'—you are strapped down inside your 'mech, inside a drop cocoon that has been left suspended in space. While they're on their way dirt-side they're surrounded by armor, ECM, chaff, and all other sorts of things to encourage people who might be inclined to discourage them from landing to miss—and all sorts of weapons to deal with those who don't. On the other hand you are stuck in orbit in a heavily-stealthed drop-cocoon, but if someone happens across it you're a sitting duck and all the ECM in the galaxy is useless since you can't use it without giving away your position.

If the seals on your cockpit crack you get to the unenviable experience of trying to breathe the inert argon atmosphere filling the cocoon. If cocoon seals crack instead you're one crack away from trying to breathe vacuum, you no longer have a nice insulating layer between cold emptiness and your mech, and there is a good chance that if you live long enough to head for dirt the cocoon will implode—or something like that—when it hits atmo (there is a reason, after all, why there is an atmosphere inside the cocoon even if it escapes me at the moment).

Strapped in and waiting to die in 'mech that was almost completely powered down to cut down on emissions gives one a lot of time to think, which was the last thing I really wanted to be doing. So instead I kept myself busy by checking the few systems that were online and drawing from my very limited battery. First there were the canned air—which didn't rely on batteries, but the scrubbers did—and then the heat-sinks, only they were hooked up to the cocoon to absorb thermal radiation from the system primary. This had the effect of keeping the inside of the cocoon cool to observing thermal sensors, and also provided a limited amount of heat to keep me in a condition somewhat better than that of a popsicle. The complicated heat-exchange system was working in reverse of its normal operation. Instead of keeping the 'mech—and the pilot driving it—cool (normally necessary to keep one from locking up and the other from cooking) it was pumping the little available heat into both to keep ice crystals from forming in the actuators and the pilot (yours truly) warm enough that he would, hopefully, not be an ice cube when the call came in to hit orbit.

Unfortunately a long battery-life isn't something most battlemech designers think of as important. Certainly not on the same level as, say, the engine, weapons, and armor. Usually they're right, but every so often a time comes along when one of us 'mech-jockeys wish we had a little bit more. For example, I was going to have to consider fairly soon whether I wanted to stay warm, keep breathing, or have enough power left in the cells to kick-start the fusion plant. But I had a little while before that point so I sat back, closed by eyes, and tried not to dream.

I'm not successful.


	2. Chapter 2

Over Terra,

March 15, 2777

There is a terrible beauty in an orbital combat drop—all the wonder of a League-Day firework display, all the thrill of a performance by the Nova Hawks (the SLDF's premier Aerospace Demonstration Team), and all the stunning choreography of a Russian Ballet on a stage more than fifty klicks on a side and extending more than a hundred high. ECM—jammers, strobes, decoys, and the rest—provide a high-tech electronic orchestra. Warning alarms and the whine of weapon discharges add an aural component to their purely electronic counterparts. Drop-pods exploding open to rain down their cargos, the black-balls of exploding flack and larger explosions of missiles, the ruler-straight glow of air ionized by lasers and the jagged lightning-like stroke-_flash_ of PPCs serve as highlights. All the while hundreds of 'mechs are falling from the sky like dark birds against the insect shadow-clouds of infantry making sub-orbital free-fall drops.

Assault shuttles make their own drops. The initial ones not carrying anyone at all save their crews, but furiously kicking out a cargo of tinsel-foil chaff, bright IR-flares, small remote transmitters that ape the electronic broadcast of an entire lance of recon 'mechs, and even more ECM transmitters that only add to the confusion. The follow-up wave makes a mad rush for the ground in a frantic effort to disgorge infantry and tanks, while the third wave with its load of infantry, tanks, and mechs circles overhead.

Dropships are the heavy bass drum and timpani to the assault shuttles' snare drums. There one of the Marine's _Tripoli_-class gunfire support dropships—little more than a remote weapons platform that can been dropped (once) off shore and armed with one of the biggest gun system ever put on a wet-naval vessel (or dropship for that matter)—angled away from the primary drop zone, while the driver of _Leopard_ dove for the ground, probably intending to make a semi-controlled crash in an effort to get his lance of 'mechs down as quickly and safely as possible.

Throughout the chaotic dance aerospace fighters added a visual descant, whirling and twirling and never taking a straight line and all the while flashing silver-edged wings. Red-trimmed blue _Spads_ and _Rapiers_ of the Marine units, wing-shaped _Swifts_ with their canted tails (indicative of the Super-606 variant) painted the distinctive red of the 332nd Fighter Group, and a red _Zero_ moving too fast to make out the black crest of the _Kuronami_—the 'Black Wave' of the DCMS that had defied the Coordinator rather than submit to a man who shielded himself with hostages—danced with the Rimmer's _Doomwhales_, _Krakens_, and _Saberpike_ (these last a Rimmer clone of the _Gotha_ complete with Hegemony tech inside) aerospace fighters.

Then the beauty turned into the all-too-familiar nightmare as a drop cocoon exploded into a fireball rather than the deliberate mech-disgorging flower-blossom. The high-pitched scream wasn't an ascending firework, but the death-scream of a 'mech-jock who just lost his boosters and was pinned in his command couch by g-forces and unable to even manually bale out, transmitted live over the com-system. The _Leopard_ far below me turned into a shredded hunk of metal but didn't explode, a red-painted _Dictator_ wasn't so fortunate and a whole battalion of Dracs went to meet their Ancestors.

I acknowledged Captain Willis' order and glanced at my radar but the lance commanders were already shifting their formation and we had a _looong_ way to go before dirt so I thumbed over to the Regiment/Battalion command push just in time to watch the indicator light for Light-Colonel Deski wink out.

"Eyes!" I said, snapping back to the company push. "Eyes for _Steelhorse_."

"Seventy-degree mag, high, falling fast," was the almost instant report and I threw a visual onto a secondary monitor and skewed it around. The dropship looked intact, there was some scoring from glancing energy weapon hits, and a few pit-marks from ballistics; otherwise the hull looked untouched. The drive plume told a different story. Instead of a thick pillar of exhaust _Steelhorse_ was riding down a weak and feeble column of flame which meant Colonel Deski and his entire command staff were already dead, it'd just take a bit longer before the Reaper could collect. Major Holburton's indicator still burned and the Colonel was still on the line so maybe we weren't all—

My radar warning receiver shrieked in my ear and I twisted in time to see an unfamiliar fighter with a House Amaris' shark-motif paintjob lining up on me. I could see its PPCs charge…

And then it was so much scrap headed for the dirt but I was falling faster.

I checked my altimeter, goosed my jets to change my alignment slightly, then hit them hard to change my descent profile for anyone watching on radar. At the peak of my burn I cut loose the first part of my drop pack and three heavily stealthed drones dropped away. Each drone carried a mix of remote sensors and ECM emitters and would scatter their cargo widely. Assuming enough of the others had gotten their cargo away we'd leave a wide sensor network for the follow-on waves, even if we were slaughtered.

Another fighter, this one a conventional air-breather made a run at me and this time _Bun Bun_ squealed to me as the targeting reticule flashed green and I thumbed over to the secondary drop pack and thumbed the pickle. Ten free-flight rockets with fragmentation warheads burst from their disposable launch tubes which released their shackles and fell free from _Bun Bun_ as soon as their cargo had been released. The pilot was good, almost good enough, and in fact was able to keep the rockets from damaging the airframe itself, or even the missiles hanging on its racks. But I still heard the deep, concussive _thuds_ of the air-sucking engines blowing their innerds out the back.

_Bun Bun_ cheerfully tootled a kill as the pilot of the stricken craft ejected.

The cheerful toot turned into a warning cry and the computer that served as _Bun Bun_'s brain threw an image capture from one of the remote sensors up on a secondary monitor. Anchoring a line of _Tigershark_, _Rampage_, and _Mako_ battlemechs was a quartet of _Behemoths_. I didn't need to see their paintjob to know that we'd just dropped into at least one of the elite Republican Guard's brigade-sized 'regiments'; they were the only one who had the _Mako_s.

But as bad news as they were, the _Behemoths_ were worse. Fortunately it didn't seem like the Usurper had very many of them, and the ones he did have seemed to be little more than an initial production run for prototyping and testing. Equally fortunately they didn't seem to be very mobile, but only because their leg actuators had a tendency to freeze at inopportune moments which made them little more than semi-mobile bunkers. Albeit bunkers armed with a pair of gauss rifles, a pair of large pulse lasers, and a small pulse laser…and layered with more armor than a 'mech of any size had any real purpose carrying. There hadn't been more than a company of the things spread out over all of Mars and now we had an entire lance of them in what was supposed to be a diversionary attack.

I designated targets for the last eight packs of rockets for _Bun Bun_ to engage as soon as we touched down, slaved the autocannon to my right eye and activated the jaw trigger so I only had to clench my teeth to fire it, and brought up the arms in independent mode before wiggling back in my seat. The contact points of the neural-interface suit along my spine, arms, and legs were suddenly cold and uncomfortable and I resisted the urge to loosen the suit. There wasn't time, and besides, the suit not only was much more efficient at cooling me than anything anyone else had, but it could protect me against small arms fire, and the full-body neural-interface gave me much more control over _Bun Bun_ than hand controls and neural-helm alone.

I flipped upright, pushed the pedals to their stops, then stomped hard for a full burn on my jets. I felt the shudder of the rockets streaking free more than I felt _Bun Bun_ ground, but I'd already flipped my arms out and gave a pair of _Jackrabbits_ a burst of point-blank laser/PPC fire, and stitched a three-round burst across another. A bar of light flashed past me, making these the laser-armed 'Joker' variant. One of the two simply stopped in the middle of the battlefield, only to be flattened by a 'mech three times its weight landing on it, while the other displayed the heat-flash of a breached engine compartment, then sort of sagged in the middle as too many structural members melted.

"_Bushwhack_ elements report." And then, because Captain Willis hadn't yet and miracle of miracles all three lances had grounded without a loss. "Formation Victor, Jace take point, thataway," I said, indicating a likely knot of 'mechs. "Captain Willis, come up _Bushwhack_-Prime." I changed to the battalion push. "Captain Willis, come up _Bushwhack_-Prime."

"Captain Willis is down," someone I didn't know replied.

"Dead?"

"Neg, his 'Mech spilled. He's alive but out of it."

B Company, Mech Battalion, 3d Cav (Brave Rifles) was mine for the moment.

"Major Holburton," I continued, "_Bushwhack _-5. _Bushwhack_ has grounded."

No response, try another push.

"Major Holburton, come up _Bandit_-Prime."

Again no response. Fuck.

"_Ambush_, _Charger_, _Diablo_, come up _Bandit-_Prime," I ordered as I spurted the jump jets just enough to clear the ground and jammed the left ones to jink me out of the scope of anyone lining up on me.

One by one _Ambush_-two, _Charger_-one, and _Diablo_-three came up and that was it. Two second-looies and a Master Sergeant. Okay, so I was a first LT which didn't make me so much higher than the two lieutenants, and I was a former Sergeant so even the later wasn't a big deal, and, hell, by this time we'd already seen so much battle that such junior ranks didn't really mean a whole heck of a lot. On the other hand I was supposed to believe that every company commander and above, including the battle staffs and security details for both Colonel Deski and Major Holburton were dead or disabled, and all the company XOs (save myself) had gone with them?

I cut to the battalion-wide. "_Bandit_-elements, _Bushwhack_-Five is assuming control. Action North. Do _not_ become decisively engaged. Blow through and circle."

A _Tigershark_—basically a Rimmer _Phoenix_ with advanced heat sinks, endo-steel skeleton, and extra-light engine that made room for a second PPC, upgraded both SRM-2 to Streak-capable launchers, and added an Anti-Missile System and Guardian-series ECM—touched down literally in front of me. There are times when a 'mech might have to engage another half-again its mass, and there are ways of doing so when they come up. Right when said 'mech is going to engage a line that out-masses and out-guns it is not the former, and by stopping right in front of it is not one of the later. I mean, he was so close that I was able to use _Bun Bun_'s arms to bat away his own arm-mounted PPCs and put a round of 40mm SCC armor-piercing explosive-cored autocannon ammunition right down the inboard tube of the other 'mech's SR-2 Streak Launcher.

The launcher blew apart and _Bun Bun_ flashed a diagnostic report (minor cosmetic) on a monitor as the other launcher managed to do its job. I kicked out with _Bun Bun_'s leg and the force-feedback amplifiers let me feel the satisfying _crunch_ of the _Phoenix_'s knee actuator faithfully mimicking a human knee's reaction to a similar kick. Energy weapons at point-blank range cut it off at the knees and I skipped over him, the jump jets in _Bun Bun_'s left hip reduced the cockpit to a molten ruin.

_Bun Bun_ tooted at me and flashed VI on a secondary monitor, then, before I could punch in a query, showed the death of the fighter. This was followed by the two _Jackrabbits_, a _Tigershark_ blowing apart under the rocket barrage, the third _Jackrabbit_ dying as the last autocannon round came in at just the right angle and pierced the armor-plast of the cockpit screen before detonating inside the small chamber, and then my most recent _Tigershark_.

Not on the ground for five minutes and I already had six kills. Not a record by a long stretch but a pretty good start to the day's work.

We hit the main line—or at least the first line—and then things became too confused for _Bun Bun_ to straighten out for me, at least not in real time. My people were heading in the more or less right way and I snapped off shots at enemy 'mechs as I saw them. I saw lasers stab into a _Mako_ and it disappeared in a cloud of smoke as the missile magazines making up nearly a third of its mass promptly exploded. Three light-weight medium 'mechs, one with the gold bands on the ankles of a member of the Order of the Spur, set on a _Rampage_ even larger than _Bun Bun._ My own weapons lanced into the back of another that had set its sights on a 'mech from A Company.

I found the Regimental push and called up my Boss. "Colonel Chaffee, _Bushwhack_ Five. Landing Zone is not, repeat _not_ secure."

"Report, _Bushwhack_."

"The Primary is guarded by Republican Guards. Looks like one of the heavy 'mech regiments. I have not made contact with Major Holburton or other _Bandit_-element COs. _Bushwhack_-six is disabled, I do not know status of other company commanders and XOs."

_Bun Bun_ screamed at me and the threat warning display lit up like a Christmas tree. I twisted my 'mech's torso around. It was enough to make the hit scrape by rather than hit directly, but it took off a third of my left torso armor with it and the armor on the damage display lit up with a lurid yellow. _Bun Bun_'s PPCs lashed out—the range was too long for lasers—and the _Behemoth_ didn't even flinch as one got a direct hit and a moment later _Bun Bun_ screamed as armor shatt—

_Discontinuity _


	3. Chapter 3

Location: Unknown  
Date: Unknown  
Time: T(Transition)+0:00:01  
Flag Bridge, SLS _Hood_

Rear Admiral Ariel Murakama, SLDF (Naval branch), fought against the nausea that ripped through her body and she forced herself to take a steadying breath. She had never had the trouble with motion sickness that some people did, had never had a twinge of the similar space-sickness that affected many people the first time they experienced true micro-gravity. The unsettling vertigo that could cripple people not prepared for it the first time they went EV hadn't bothered her. In fact, she'd never even experienced any _dizziness_ from a jump-transit—unlike something like ninety-eight percent of people—much less something as severe as Transit Disorientation Syndrome.

But now she was fighting just to keep her breakfast down and she could hear from somewhere behind her that someone on her flag deck wasn't so fortunate. The environmental systems were still working at peak efficiency and the smell was rapidly whisked away, but she could only hope that whoever had lost their meal had managed to grab one of the jump-sickness bags in time to prevent the mess that micro-gravity and vomit always caused.

"Admiral?" someone asked.

"A moment," she said, breathing heavily and noticing for the first time that her body _hurt_. Not the deep aches that came with heavy and violent maneuvering, but the sharp throb that she associated with being slammed around inside the shock frame of her command couch. The tactical repeaters deployed smoothly from their stowed position, but most of the screens were either blank or filled with an electronic hash. "Okay, report. Astrogation, what happened?"

"Miss-jump, Admiral," the lieutenant-commander who was her staff astrogator turned his command couch around to look back at her. "The computers, those of them I have that are working, are trying to ID our location now, but I can tell you that it isn't the Sol system. We're inside a star system; the emergence point must have been a fairly sizeable pirate point that has since closed. There is a planet nearby, we're about a half-day from orbit, maybe a little more."

"Thank you. Tactical?" Ariel asked.

"We're clear for three-zero-kay-klicks, Admiral," the captain said definitively.

Ariel was about to ask for more when a screen near her left knee went dark, then displayed _Hood_'s unit crest. A moment later it cleared and a man in his mid forties appeared. He was trim, though his shoulders had that slim look that came with prolonged micro-G that no amount of time on a wheel-deck could help with. His eyes were tired, but bright, and his epaulets bore the insignia of an SLDF naval captain…and on his breast opposite the Cameron Star was the small gold star that signified a jump-capable combat command.

"Captain Paulus," she said formally.

"Admiral Murakama," he replied in the same tone.

"Status?"

"We haven't heard from most of the ships in the Task Force yet, Admiral," he replied. "There are extensive system failures from the jump, mostly in sensors and communications. Central fire control is off-line, though the on-mount crews are reporting that their equipment is ready."

"Our dropships?"

"The…effects seem to vary depending upon distance from the origin point of the KF-drive field," Captain Paulus told her. "Engineering was barely disturbed. All of the dropships on _Hood_ came through intact, but there are extensive system shorts."

"Understood," she said. She thought for a moment. "Start your repairs, Captain. As each ship reports in pass it and its status along to my staff. I want a standard spherical formation, _Mercy_ and the rest of the train in the center, then transports and carriers, then warships, then the _Pentagon_s and other gun platforms as they report all systems operational. For now sort by combat readiness, if there's a transport with its guns in order have it moved to the outer part of the sphere until it can be relieved."

He nodded tightly and she toggled the connection closed so that he could get back to work, then touched the controls that caused her command chair to rotate around. "Sir?" she asked.

The man sitting in the auxiliary command couch straightened as he tucked away a space-sickness bag and arched an eyebrow. Ariel almost smiled, both at the familiar look, and because it didn't trigger the twinge of annoyance it once had. "How bad is it, Admiral?" he asked.

"Bad enough, General," she said. "It looks like everyone is here, but not all of them are up for talking to us yet."

"I don't blame them," he said with a twitch that might be a grin.

Ariel forced to keep from smirking. Richard Winters would never be a spacer. He was fine most of the time—actually, he'd led the fleet in zero-g hand-to-hand combat on two different occasions—but he suffered from one of the more violent cases of TDS that she'd ever encountered. Without the latest med-tech it was likely that the miss-jump would have been crippling for him. With it, well, the space-sickness bag he had just secured wasn't the first one tapped on the left side of his chair, and more fresh ones waited on the right side. He always was prepared.

He was also the only one on the flag bridge without an SLDF uniform. Its cut was the same (aside from that it was buttoned to the throat and had a high round collar), but it was a midnight blue trimmed with scarlet, and lacked both the Cameron Star on its breast and the world-sash (or the school rag preferred by many officers). Glittering on either side of the collar was a polished insignia of a hemisphere of Terra (Western hemisphere on his right collar, Eastern on his left) with a rifle crossed with an anchor and fouled rope, and encircled with laurel branches. On the breast, instead of the Cameron Star of the SLDF, was the yellow sun surrounded by nine circles, each with a different colored pip; the device of the Terran Hegemony.

The uniform, the first time she had seen it, had irked her, something which he still teased her about in private. The fact that he'd been put in command had bothered her even more, although, she admitted, he did leave the ship handling to her, which meant that even though he'd probably listened in on every word she'd just traded with James…

"The systems took a beating from the transit," she said. "The literature has always hypothesized that that would be the case, but to my knowledge there hasn't been any real definitive proof. Personally I suspect that it depends on the jump and the ship in question. As you know a normal jump _appears_ instantaneous for those experiencing it, but there is some duration that depends upon the mass of the vessel and the distance traveled—a fully laden _Potempkin_, for example, has a jump-duration of six-point-two-five minutes at 30 light-years."

Winters frowned slightly, "and?"

"And if the jump had gone normally, _Birkenhead_ and _Tradewind_ would have been transiting right around now, and _Vulcan_ would be a few seconds yet. But instead both they and _Prometheus_ emerged at the same time as the rest of the task force."

Winters' face tightened, but then he visibly forced himself to relax and nodded his understanding. He started to say more, but his own communication panel blinked at him. "Thank you, Admiral," he said. She nodded to him courteously and turned back to her staff as he turned to his communications panel and tapped the acceptance control.

It blanked, and then cleared to show another man in a uniform like his, save that it had two eight-pointed stars on each epaulet instead of three. "How bad is it, Jim?" he asked.

"It's…bad," the other man said. "There have been a number of injuries, at least four people so bad they had to be tanked, and one fatality—freak fall, broken neck, nothing the corpsmen could do. But…it could have been worse."

Winters nodded his acceptance of the situation. He didn't like it, but there was damn little he could do about it. "And the equipment?"

The other Marine snorted. "That's anyone's guess. Half the reporting systems are down, that is, we're not getting any response from them, not even a 'unit is no longer operational' response. Those that are up report everything from dropships blowing up—they haven't, we've been able to check that much at least—to being ready for an emergency combat drop. If I had to make a guess I'd say that reality lies somewhere in between and that some units are better off than others, but until a physical check is complete we can't know which ones they are."

A light began flashing on the panel.

"Hold on, Jim, I'm getting another call, probably Kit," Winters said, splitting the screen in half. Like the two Marines, Kenneth Ivanhoe Tennyson 'Kit' Carson wore a uniform that had started with the same cut as an SLDF uniform. Unlike those worn by the two Marines it hadn't had any physical alterations done to it (aside from it being done in dark blue rather than SLDF white). Instead the world sash and Cameron Star had been removed (the later replaced by the Terran Hegemony device), the uniform had been trimmed in yellow, and the SLDF insignia on the lapels had been replaced with crossed sabers over hemispheres of Terra in the same pattern as the Marine's wore. In deference to the micro-gravity conditions he wore the yellow neckerchief-style scarf reversed and tucked into his uniform tunic like an ascot. The scarf, and the beret that replaced his usual Stetson in micro-grav, indicated that he'd come up through the _North American_ Cavalry Brigade—well, squadron originally, back before the coup.

"Kit, how are things?" he asked.

"Shitty, Dick," he said bluntly. "The problem is I don't know how shitty. Most of it you already know about, same stuff before that…whatever it was—a lot of holes in need of warm bodies, morale, stuff like that. Hell, Jim has the same problems as you well know. Counting the units that need warm bodies, or have warm bodies and need gear, or have neither, and then taking into account feedback spikes in the electronics and whatever else went wrong from that jump, I have two regiments in decent shape. Third Cavalry, you remember them."

"Nor-Am unit; dragoons, if I remember. Dropped into the middle of the 7th Republican Guards," Winters said.

"That's the one. They were stood to when we jumped. Most of their equipment came through as well. I can make good the defectives by shifting gear from other units. If I had to I could even bring them up to full strength by depleting some of the others, though their Colonels won't like that at all.

"The second regiment are The Director-General's Royal Lancers. They go back further than the 3d, and materially and personnel-wise are in better condition, but they're a Lancer formation. They don't have the infantry or their tracks like the 3d does, but their armor is all hover-type and their mechs are all light units. The 3d also has an attached heavy 'mech battalion—really a reinforced company at this point—that the Lancers don't have.

"If you need me to I can probably throw together a medium-sized brigade if we don't have to drop right away. What about you, Frank?"

"I don't want to trust my landing craft until the techs have had a chance to go over them with a fine-toothed comb, and that goes double for the artillery-support LCs. The primary morgue is shut down, energy spike or something. It'll be a while before all those suits of armor can be checked. We have more in storage, but it'd be faster to check the ones we have. On the upside the specialty morgue came through so I can field a mixed MI battalion for recon, space, and water ops, and the drop capsules checked out clean so I can even drop them if you can pick them back up."

The rivalry between the Marines and the Cavalry was, like the units themselves, traditional. In fact, Richard had frequently wondered before the coup if it was maintained more because there was a tradition of rivalry rather than a rivalry in and of itself. That said, the two division commanders were very different people. Jim—properly Francis Jameson Halliday—ended to be methodical and calculating with a talent for identifying his opponents' likely moves and having plans prepared for any contingency. Kit, by contrast, was arrogant, sometime to the point of being brash, with a flare for seat-of-the-pants improvisation. Most who met them thought the only thing that they had in common was that they despised their first names, but a few—including one Richard Winters—knew that they had been friends from before they had first enlisted in the SLDF.

"General?"

Winters looked up.

"All ships are reporting now, General," Rear Admiral Murakama told him. "All report system failures to some extent, but all have functioning life support, power, and engines. There have been some failures among the droppers, but all have been tied into their parent ship so that isn't a problem as far as habitability goes. The best of the lot is _Mercy_, probably because of all those ultra-redundant systems they built into her before they decided what they were going to finish refitting her as. Her efficiency is somewhat reduced until the primaries can be reestablished, but she's open for business if needed. _Prometheus_ isn't so lucky; a power spike blew out all of her bay's port-side docking clamps so she's closed for business until they can be replaced. I talked to her commander, he says sixteen to twenty hours and maybe more, mostly due to the time needed to clear other damage before replacements can be made.

"We've also identified where we are."

Winters waited, and when she didn't continue he cleared his throat.

"Planting, Sir," she said flatly.

"Planting?"

"It's a breadbasket world, Sir," she said. "Negligible industry, and not terribly rich in mineral wealth, but it is one of the food producers for a sphere roughly a hundred light-years wide. It has a really nice air mix at a comfortable pressure, gravity that is darn near one standard _gee_, good placement in the liquid-oxy zone, less than seven degrees axial tilt, and didn't need a whole lot of terraforming for terrestrial crops. The soil doesn't have high concentrations of heavy metals, and there isn't a microbe that finds chlorophyll tasty, for example.

"Its coreward and anti-spinward of Terra, in the Lyran Commonwealth, and despite its relatively low volume of traffic it is a central node that links to several important systems in the region" she hesitated. "It's also just over three hundred and seventy light years from Terra, meaning we miss-jumped nearly four hundred light years."

"That's confirmed?" Winters asked with a steadiness he didn't feel.

"We have good spectral lines on the system primary and the twelve nearest stars," she replied. "In-system neutrino emissions are indicative of a technical society utilizing hydrogen-fueled fusion power plants. We're starting to pick up transmissions from the planet, both in mandarin and in standard English. I'd say it's pretty definitive, General."

"I hear a 'but' in there, Admiral."

"Yes, Sir," she agreed. "There is some…drift compared to our charts."

"Drift?"

"The local planetary orbit and the nearest stars don't precisely match our navigational charts," she said. "It's probably nothing to worry about. Fleet hasn't had a survey crew out here in a long time and the Great House survey crews aren't as good as ours…assuming that they give us accurate charts in the first place. It isn't much variation, a few meters on the case of the orbit of Planting, even less on the stars. In fact, the only reason we picked it up is because Adam, my staff astrogator, was a Survey-puke once upon a time and took it on his own initiative to update our charts. As I said, probably nothing to worry about."

"And if it is something to worry about?" Winters asked after a moment.

"Adam?" Murakama asked after hesitating a moment.

The Lieutenant-Commander turned his acceleration couch around to face Winters. "Sir, Ma'am, with respect, but the Admiral took what I said out of context."

"How so?" Murakama asked. She made it a point to not berate her staff for disagreeing with her, but she had little patience for those who wasted her time.

"What I said, Ma'am, was meant as the observation of an admitted Survey specialist who happened to notice that our charts aren't as accurate as a dedicated survey ship would have. The derivation on the planetary orbit is less than three meters, that's something like two times ten-to-the-negative-eighth of a percent of error, probably less. I could plot an L1 planet/primary-jump with these coordinates as is, and, to be perfectly honest, the discrepancies between our charts and the observational data are no worse than I've seen a hundred times before in other systems.

"I remember one system, not thirty light years from Terra, whose chart had missed a thousand-klick wide satellite of one of the outer-system bodies. Not screwed up the orbit, but had neglected to mention it entirely.

"The last time we had a Survey crew out this way it was during the Rim Worlds campaign and they never crossed the border into the Commonwealth. Each of the Great Houses is supposed to survey and update the charts on the systems inside their boarders and pass them to the SLDF. Compliance varies. The Fed Suns usually have very good crews and provide accurate charts, for example, while the Combine tends to…stall."

Despite the situation Winter snorted. He'd never much cared about system charts, but he could well imagine the Dracs doing a lot more than merely 'stalling' when told to hand over maps of their territory. "Okay, for the sake of argument, what if it's _not_ because our charts are very slightly off?"

Adam Welnecke took a deep breath and then let it out in a rush as he stared off somewhere in the direction of a bulkhead as he thought furiously. "Sir, every time a dropship breaks atmo- it alters the orbit of a planet by a small, but definite, amount. This is caused by its engines pushing—"

"I am familiar with basic physics, Commander," Winters said wryly. "The engines impart momentum on both, but the planet is so much more massive than a dropship the effects on the planet are negligible."

"Yes, Sir," he agreed. "But over a long enough period those effects can add up. Not enough to significantly alter a planet's trajectory, but enough to be measurable. Also, stars are not stationary. Their movement relative to each other is, again, so small its effectively non-existent except in cases of multi-star systems. The few of those charted that have habitable planets are all distant-binaries and still take centuries—or longer—to orbit their common center of gravity, but in the case of a close binary—"

"Commander, get to the point," Winters said.

"Sorry, Sir," the other officer said. "What I'm trying to say is that the variation could have been introduced due to a passage of time."

"You mean we're in the future?" Winters asked.

"You mean subject to when we left and if that's what happened at all, Sir?" Adam asked doubtfully, "Probably. I know the theory has always said that a KF-drive miss-jump could result in temporal-displacement and that the math allowed for it. I also know that the math is so complex that it's driven some of the people who've seriously looked at it insane. To the best of my knowledge, however, it has never been successfully demonstrated in a laboratory setting much less happen for real."

Winters gave him a steady look.

Adam sighed, "The gist of it, from my understanding, is that a miss-jump of the kind were speculating about would create a temporal-neutral pocket which could move in any direction, forward or backward, in time until the pocket was disrupted. What we'd actually notice would appear to be a normal jump, only we'd emerge in the same place we left from but on a different date. That's clearly not the case here, Sir, since we have physical separation from our origin point."

"Could you calculate how much time had passed?" Murakama asked.

Adam shrugged, "It'd be easier to just turn on the radio and listen in on weather broadcasts, Admiral. Simply gathering enough data to build a model I could use would take months, if not years."

"Admiral," Captain Eric LeBlanc cut in and both Winters and Ariel turned to look at him.

Ariel Murakama and her tac-officer could not be more dissimilar. She was from Kaus Australius, one of the lowest gravity worlds inhabited by man. The result was a woman who was short and fine-boned—and despite her last name was of almost pure Irish extraction—who looked remarkably like a pixie if one hadn't seen her drive her _Texas_-class flagship right into the heart of one of the toughest system defenses ever designed. Her staff tactical officer was the product of a gravity-well nearly three times as deep. He had dark eyes that were set deep in a pock-marked face that was only a few shades lighter, and when he spoke, spoke with a deep rasp. Winters has seen the like before, shrapnel often left deep scars, but LeBlanc's had a mottling to it he had only seen a handful of times before and then only in conjunction with a similar rasp. The scars of a man who had been in death pressure and managed to survive it.

"We've detected a group of ships maneuvering towards the planet. CIC says that the Zenith jump-zone was their origin point and we're picking up side-wash from their in-system drive. Projected time for a zero-zero intercept with the planet is a little less than twenty four hours."

"A convoy?" Winters asked. "Merchant ships coming to pick up a grain shipment or the like?"

"No, General," LeBlanc said softly. "It looks like an invasion force."

"Class IDs?"

"None at this time," Captain Ruth Bakerfield, Ariel's chief of staff, replied from where she hovered next to LeBlanc.

"Remnants of the Usurper's fleet?" Winters asked.

"Icar is only two jumps away," Ariel admitted after bringing up a chart of the nearest inhabited systems, "that's right on the boarder of the Rim Worlds. But you've read the same reports I have. Steiner's already snapped up most of the systems within three or four jumps of here that were formerly part of the Republic. I suppose it _could_ be a raiding force to get food, but—"

"Definitely _not_ Republican," LeBlanc said. He turned around. "It's still too early for class IDs on the droppers, but one of the vessels decelerating towards the planet is a WarShip." He took a breath, "It's a _Black Lion_."

"It's a _what_?" Winters asked sharply.

"It's a _Black Lion_-class battlecruiser, Sir," LeBlanc said, "and unlike the droppers it has a live transponder beacon. It's SLS _Ivanhoe_."

"Ma'am," Lieutenant Commander Malachi Telmachi.

Ariel turned to her staff communication officer.

"We're getting transmissions from the planet, Ma'am," he said. "Most of them are pretty confused. The two that are clearest are system control—who demands to know who we are and our purpose in the system—and a Hauptman-General who claims to be the CO of the 41st Avalon Hussars."

Ariel stared at him blankly, but behind her General Winters voiced her confusion.

"Avalon Hussars are a Fed-Sun formation. What are they doing all the way out here?"

"I don't know, General, but they say they're about to be attacked and advise us to stay clear," Malachi told him. "They have recordings of communications with the en—er…hostile ships."

Ariel pursed her lips slightly, but nodded. The decision hadn't been made yet to designate the incoming vessels as enemies, though their intent was clearly hostile. Malachi had almost jumped the gun and both of them knew that, but they also both knew that he'd caught himself and the situation allowed for some leeway. "Go ahead and play it," Ariel told him.

"Yes, Ma'am." He didn't even have to look, just swept a hand over the controls he'd readied in anticipation and a moment later a steady baritone voice issued from the flag bridge speakers.

"_I am saKhan Garth Radick of Clan Wolf, Commander of Beta Galax. What forces contest my claim of this world?_"

"_Uh…Incoming Vessels, we did not copy your last. Be advised you have encroached upon a territorial possession of the Federated Commonwealth_," a voice said. There was a slight pause, and then it went on, "_We require you to cut your acceleration immediately and heave-to for boarding for customs, revenue, and safety inspection_."

"_I am _saKhan_ Garth Radik of Clan Wolf, Galaxy Commander of Beta Galaxy, and we are about to do far more than 'encroach' upon your territorial boundaries. I claim this world for Clan Wolf. What forces contest my claim?_"

"Is there anything else, Commander?" Murakama asked as the playback ended.

"No, Admiral," Malachi said, shaking his head. "That was it."

"Galaxy Commander?" Adam Welnecke scoffed. "What type of rank is that?"

"_Khan_ was the title held by the rulers of the Mongol empire, Commander," Heinrich Schmidt, Ariel's staff intelligence officer, said. "Note also, they also use the Greek alphabet to identify their units. They have two a minimum, but it seems likely the second, Beta, is the only one in-system. The use of the word 'galaxy' and the connotations involved, including the number of droppers heading in-system, suggest a fairly substantial force."

"Or so they say," LeBlanc cut in. "It's interesting how he gives his force disposition and asks for ours."

"And if we knew what a galaxy was, you may have a point," Ruth said. "But he wasn't exactly forthcoming about that."

LeBlank considered her for a moment, then tapped a query into his command consol. "We're still waiting on class IDs, but we can estimate sizes based on drive-signatures. Call it anywhere from a heavy regiment to a medium brigade, depending on the configuration of the dropships and the exact mix of equipment. Closer to the regimental size if it is more 'mech-centered, larger if it has more of a combined-arms configuration."

Ruth scowled at him, then turned to Murakama. "He doesn't honestly expect anyone to give him that information, does he?"

"What if he does?" Heinrich asked her calmly.

Ariel considered that for a moment, then turned to Adam. "How quickly can we be at the planet?"

"We're four-one-point-six m-klicks from Planting, call it two-point-three light minutes," the astrogator said. "I can have us in a zero/zero intercept with the planet in eighteen hours at a two-g hard burn. It'll be expensive on fuel, but it'll get us there first. If you want a standard one-g burn it'll take a bit more than three-six hours to do the same because the planet is moving generally away from us."

"Heavy gravity will make things harder on the techs," Winters said.

"I'm aware of that, General," Ariel told him, "but this is your call. Including whether or not we're going to intervene."

He considered for a moment, his fingers softly tapping on the arm of his command couch. "We'll intervene—as peacekeepers, for now. Get us moving at one-g, I'll have to see what units are in best shape to augment the 3d Cavalry, and then we'll send it along ahead. Ariel, if you would find some escorts?"

"Of course, General," Ariel said, behind her she heard Ruth speaking to Captain Paulus to get the task force moving. "And _Prometheus_ and _Mercy_?"

"We'll bring _Mercy_ with us for now, even if there isn't any fighting having her disaster relief supplies on hand may be useful. As for the _Prometheus_, get her clear along with the rest of the train. See if you can get a hold of the Nessies and send them along as gunslingers to keep her out of trouble." He paused, "And then double-check the Task Force codebooks. The private ones. If we have to use the HPGs I don't want anyone to be listening in. I'll draft up a formal report that we can send to command, but for now I want us sealed up tight, understood?"

"Yes, Sir," Ariel agreed as she felt a shiver run through the ship and then felt her body settle slightly in the command chair as the transit drive began to impart the sensation of gravity.


	4. Chapter 4

Location: Planting system  
Date: Unknown

SLS _Chapultepec_ LHD-314

"Fucking aero-jocks," I grunted as I slammed feet-first to the deck after sliding down a ladder faster than intended. Maneuvering a 'mech around an uncrowded dropship was annoying under the best of circumstances. Transferring one from a crowded dropship to the WarShip that said dropship was attached to, while under two-Gs of thrust was an absolute bitch, and I'd just transferred the last of eighteen of the things.

"You okay, Boss-man?" Tamara Wilson asked.

"Fine," I told her, dodging a pallet of missiles that was following a tech's follow-me remote like an obedient, but brainless, dog. I looked around and spotted one of the last things I expected to see. "What the hell, Tammy?" I asked. "We can't seriously be doing a drop so soon," I said gesturing towards the collapsed drop cocoons.

She shrugged and pulled a sucker out of a pocket, unwrapped it and gave it a suggestive lick before sticking it in her mouth. "No idea, Boss-man," she said. "The Ol' Man wants to see you in his office."

"Great," I said, ignoring the byplay. It wasn't as hard as it could have been. She was a leggy blond and had the looks to be a model or a high-end escort in any of the central planets of the Hegemony and she knew it too. I suppose her flirting with every guy—and girl for that matter—she met, and flaunting it in front of those who didn't respond to her was her idea of 'fun', but I had never asked. To the best of my knowledge she had never done anything that the regs would have seriously frowned on, but I had never asked about that either. Act or not, however, she usually had herself twisted deep into ship's gossip line. "Any idea of what happened with the jump?"

The sucker stilled inside her mouth and the hand that had been holding it dropped to her side as the ditz disappeared. "No, I don't. I'm pretty sure we miss-jumped, but so far nobody who knows anything is talking. The Brass has put a serious clamp on this."

"Damn," I said softly. "It's too soon, we're shot to hell and we all need some downtime."

She grinned, "well, if you're offering, Boss-man…"

"I'm not," I said flatly. I looked up at _Bun Bun_. Despite the two-G ride, techs were already swarming over her, parade-ground white disappearing under a farmland/plains five-color mottled _Flecktarn_ camouflage pattern. Two struggled with a long roll of plastic wrap to tape up the ancient 'government tartan' around the right pauldron and upper left leg that indicated an Excellent-rated (or better, in this case Superior) tour of duty with the Royal Blackwatch. The distinctive unit insignia would have already been programmed in, and would be layered on over the camo, but reprogramming the sprayers to do the tartan would take time no one really had.

"Hey!" I called to a tech that was scrambling up the ladder I had just slid down. "Make sure you tape up Bun Bun."

"What?" he asked.

"The leg art," I said, gesturing to the meter-tall switchblade-wielding evil-eyed mini-lop. "Tape it up."

"Wilco, Sir."

I nodded and turned back to Tammy. "Is the entire Task Group moving?"

"Just about. Some of the service group is hanging back with some gun-bunnies as escorts, but it looks like the rest of us are moving in. But _we're_ the only ones pulling two-gravs, I know that much."

I didn't want to think about that. "Fine, I'll go see the Old Man," I told her. "Find George and tell him that he's in charge until I get back."

Normally the 'Colonel's office' meant his quarters inside his command dropship, but since we'd moved over to the _Chappie_ I thought I'd start in the office nominally set aside on the assault transport for the commander of the landing force. Most of the trip was spent in a lift that groaned against the stress put on it by the heavy thrust, but at least it didn't have piped in music like you'd find on a civilian lift.

Ten minutes, two wrong turns, and an unhelpful Navy Senior Chief landed me in front of the Colonel's door. No sooner had I touched the admittance buzzer than the door slid open. It took two steps to cross to stand one meter in front of the desk, and I kept my eyes fixed ten centimeters above the Colonel's right ear as I saluted and said, "Major Roland Talbot, reporting to the Colonel as ordered."

He looked at me and barked, "Sit!"

I sat.

He grinned at me—though it lacked his usual humor—and I relaxed in my chair. "Scotch still your tipple?"

"Do you think I need it?" I returned. Arnold Chaffee was a good boss and one of the best Cav officers I'd ever seen. His family was practically an institution—in fact, he decided from one of its very first commanders—but he took the role to brand new heights. He was also my soon-to-be Father-in-Law. That said, he didn't play favorites and rarely offered drinks, especially during working hours.

The fact that he didn't reply except to pour a generous measure into a glass was worrying. "I got this bottle years ago, thought I'd open it when my daughter got married," he said. "Got a bunch of bottles, actually, since I didn't know what my future son-in-law would drink."

"The wedding is still on," I said, feeling a cold dread snake up my spine.

He gave me a look that managed to combine a biting humor and sympathy. "You want the bad news or the shitty news or—hell, it's all bad news. Water?"

"Please," I said. I would have preferred good spring water to the reclaimed, purified, filtered, recycled crap from the ship's service systems, but that was really hoping for too much. At least he didn't plunk a couple of ice cubes in it.

"We miss-jumped, but you probably guessed that already?"

I nodded.

"We ended up in the Planting System. It's a couple of hops from the Rim World's boarder inside the Lyran Commonwealth. Ag world, one of the principal feeders of the region."

I nodded again, accepting the glass from him. Gravity was a wonderful thing, the squeeze bulbs always left a tang to good liquor and the less said about micro-grav micro-brews the better.

"Normally that'd mean it'd take us a couple of months to get home. Less actually, considering the Nessies."

Finding out that the Hegemony had a research base building advanced WarShip drones had been a bigger surprise than it probable should have been, all things considered, but what they were capable of had been something of a shock to the Navy side. We'd ended up calling them the Nessies after the fabled creature living in the old Earth loch because, well, nobody wants to be called 'it', do they? They were able to crunch numbers in some way that was different than how we could, and could plot transient jump points nearly instantaneously. I'd had one Navy-side lieutenant (our captain rank) try to explain it to me, but she just wanted to keep going on and on about 'tactical jumping' which they couldn't quite do but could come a lot closer than anyone else, but most of the rest went over my head. I did know there weren't very many of them

"Normally?" I asked. "You mean to say that we can't go home? Why? Has the Grand Ol' General of the Army finally lost it?"

He scowled at me and I nodded a silent apology. It was one thing to think something, even talk about it in the abstract. To openly ridicule the commanding general—even if he deserved it—was something else.

"No," he said finally. "We can't go home, and Kerensky has nothing to do with it. I just got word that the miss-jump also displaced us a little more than two and a half centuries forward in time."

"It _what_?" I blurted.

"It's the year thirty-fifty," he said.

"That isn't funny," I told him flatly.

"No, it isn't," he agreed.

I stared at him for a moment, feeling numb. "Well…fuck," I muttered finally. I stared into my glass for a while, then lifted it in silent salute. "Here's to you, Mary, I hoped you had a good life."

It was very good scotch. My treatment of it did not do it justice.

All I can say in my defense is that there were extenuating circumstances.

"So do we pack up and go home?" I asked after another long period of silence. I wanted another drink but he didn't offer and I wasn't going to ask. "Does the Hegemony even want us?"

"The Hegemony isn't there any more," Chaffee told me. "We don't have a full history yet, but it looks like the Lords of the Star League didn't want to play ball. Kerensky left in '86, _twenty seven _eighty-six that is, out to where nobody knows, and took something like eighty-percent of the SDLF with him."

I stared at him. "Can you say that again?" I asked. "Because I just heard you tell me that something like eighty percent of the SLDF _deserted_. If it didn't happen before Operation Liberty I sure as hell can't see why it would happen after we _won_."

"General Kerensky left, went out beyond the back of beyond, and took most of the SLDF with him," Chaffee repeated flatly. "Took along most of the dependants, ransacked the Hegemony and remaining SLDF bases in the Star League member states, loads of war gear…"

"And people _let_ him? The Hegemony was a wreck, and he just sailed off with the stuff they needed to rebuild?"

"Apparently. There is almost certainly more that we haven't had time to hear yet, probably a lot more, but that's the broad brush strokes."

"With all do respect, that's bullshit," I told Colonel Chaffee. "Even after Liberation and the mopping up we _still_ had more troops than any of the Great Houses, that any _two_ Great Houses. I don't know the details of all the stuff the SLDF squirreled away, but I was briefed in deep enough when I was with the Blackwatch to know that if we'd wanted to reach into those reserves, equipment wasn't a problem, not in the near-to-mid term. The SLDF was the most battle-experienced army since the Age of War, maybe even further back than that. Recruiting was way up, training centers were like ten or twenty times their original size to handle them all, and then there were those units that 'volunteered' and I'm not talking about just the Legion.

"Heck, there're whole non-Royal units armed with early-gen Royal equipment. Not the more recent stuff, but still things that hadn't been released to the SLDF in general—"

"You were paying attention at the briefings after all," he observed.

"Never said I wasn't," I said. "I don't get the Navy stuff much myself, but that doesn't mean I can't tell what makes sense and what doesn't. So what happened, Kerensky wouldn't force them to compromise?"

Chaffee held up a hand. "We aren't going to discuss this now."

"We're not?" I asked, trying and failing to keep from feeling bitter.

He shook his head. "We're not."

I stood, "In that case, by your leave, Sir? I intend to go get wasted."

"Sit," he said gesturing back to the chair. "I thought you needed to know and you deserved to hear it from me. But that wasn't why I called you here, and it wasn't why I had you transfer your mechs over from the _Cincinnatus_."

"Sir?"

"Planting is about to come under attack by some people calling themselves Clan Wolf. They're well-armed, and have a _Black Lion_—"

"I'm sure the Navy is suitably impressed," I said. I didn't care for them, they were heavy on autocannons. If you needed to call in an orbital strike something that would hit the enemy rather than drop rocks on your own position was preferred.

"Local system control is," he told me. "When Kerensky left the House Lords went at each other to see who would be the new top dog. Pretty much every WarShip in existence that stuck around was destroyed a couple centuries back. Now suddenly these 'Clans' popped out of the woodwork and people are seeing WarShips for the first time in two hundred years or more and 'mechs that haven't existed in almost the same time. Technology has back-slid to the point where there are battlemechs that are designed for _physical_ combat. They never even heard of the _Comfort_-class hospital ship, much less a _Serenity_-type."

"That's…I have a hard time wrapping my head around that," I said. "The _Serenity_s were the League's favorite disaster-relief ship. They are, _were_, all over the place. Outside of the general-purpose _Volgas_ I have a heard time imagining any of the _Quixote_-class space-frame rebuilds that would be more unlikely for people to forget."

He shook his head, "The only _Quixote_-refit they have on record are the _Volga_-class transports. They don't even have the up-engined version we use for our fleet train, never mind the assault transports and all the rest."

"Did anyone tell them?" I asked.

"No." A twisted little smile worked its way across his face. After a moment he shrugged. "It doesn't really matter. General Winters has decided that we need to generate some good will so he's sent us on ahead to intervene."

"Colonel, with all respect," I began.

"The Regiment needs some down-time?" he asked with a smile that had very little humor, "We're shot to shit? I know we are, and Command knows it too. But we're in better shape than a lot of units and we had less system damage from that miss-jump than the others did. It's all repairable, but it'll take time. For now it's just us plus some supports General Winters cut us from the Legion."

I nodded slowly. The Legion had started life as a very eclectic heavy division made up of diverse units we'd picked up along the bloody trek from the—did it even still exist in any part?—Rim Worlds Republic and through the Terran Hegemony. Actually it was a bit bigger, damn near corp-sized by the time of the start of the Hegemony campaign, though it had shrunk considerably from combat losses since.

At the start it had included among its number a mostly intact division from the Rim Worlds Army who had disserted in mass to our side almost as soon are our mechs were on the ground, a regiment of Northwind Highlanders formed from 'volunteers' on 'leave' from their mercenary units that old Barb Lao had 'let' go, and the _Kuronami_. Each of the Sword of Light regiments had offered their fifth battalion (5 being the lucky number to Dracs) to form a 'regiment' that was twelve battalions strong. Making the offer meant their deaths, for in doing so they had gone against Minoru Kurita's inexplicable decision to acquiesce to Amaris. Those units had been bled over the past few years, but those years of battle had taken already elite units to an entirely new level of performance. But the Legion wasn't just filled with the outstanding, there were volunteer units from a host of periphery planets and Mercs who were in it for SLDF pay and rights to the salvage.

"Can I ask which ones?"

"Some arty, enough to give every ground squadron a second battery, keep two for myself, and have one that you can call on. There are some aviation assets that'll put us about ten percent ahead of establishment when you factor in what we have left, a light battalion of combat engineers, a company of MPs, and another company of support and logistic troops." He got another one of his twisted smiles. "He's also giving us a battalion of hover-scouts and armor, a mixed company of Orbit Dogs and Sports and Social with a few Cyberpunks for flavor—including two of their _Prowler_ E-war 'mechs—and two platoons of Marine Mobile Infantry."

Armor and artillery were always nice, same for the aviation, and engineers and the MPs and loggies would help support the additions, but I wasn't sure what good the Naval Spec-War boys and girls would do—although if we could cook up any good deep-penetration ground-ops the Blackhearts would raise all kinds of hell. The Cyberpunks rarely blew things up, even more rarely did anything that would be construed as 'proper' combat, but there were stories of them walking into an enemy HQ, twisting a computer six ways from Sunday, and then walking out again without ever being detected.

I ran the numbers in my head. Three ground squadrons that ranged from less than half strength to seventy-percent effective, one aviation squadron that wasn't much better off, and a squadron of loggies (service troops). An independent heavy cavalry battalion had been formed and attached to give the 3d a heavy punch about a third of the war through the Rim Worlds campaign, but even if the techs were able to finish re-arming and armoring us in the time we had (and found and fixed whatever was causing a pressure bleed in George's _Lancelot_'s third jumpjet) we'd be just shy of forty percent of our authorized strength.

The hover-armor wouldn't fill in the gaps in the TO&E, even if it was broken up, but it'd come fairly close. The problem with that solution was that: first, they weren't trained or experienced in working with our people, at least, not from inside the 3d Regiments own TOE. Second, they _were_ trained and experienced in working with each other. And third, if the Colonel did split them up he'd be marrying them to our less mobile tracks which would deprive them of their best asset, their speed. And no matter how flexible they were, they weren't going to be able to replace the lost 'mechs.

I wasn't sure how he was going to split up the MPs or engineers, but I probably didn't have to worry about them. Aside from a very few militarized industrialmech designs the engineers didn't tend to use 'mechs and the MPs never seemed to have them. But however you cut it they and the rest of the Regiment weren't my concern, my battalion was. The Arty would be really nice to have available…or an utter disaster.

"Why are we doing this?" I asked at last. "I mean, the Lyrans have never been as bad as some of the Houses, but you remember as well as I do what Steiner did for us. Instead of helping he sat back while we did the hard work, then goes and stabs the Republic in the back after we'd done so much getting them back on their feet—which felt a hell of a lot better than what Little Rickie had us doing before—and then _he_ goes and says that he's 'helping' us."

"Are you done?" Chafee asked.

"Not really, no," I said. I kicked back in the chair and continued, "We're refugees now. That's what the Big Boss is thinking. We need some good will from the locals, from the Houses and whoever is running home. To do that we're going to interfere against outside aggression. Protect the little people."

"Pretty much," he agreed.

I stared at him. Truth be told, I couldn't think of a better idea but it didn't stop me from feeling a little dirty. It was a lot like what I imagined a being a mercenary felt like.

"What kind of arty?" I asked at last

"A mix of _Padillas_ and _Marksmen_," he said. "I could probably find you some _Thors_, or I can swap you some _Long Toms_ and _Chaparral_s if you prefer them?"

"Um," I said, biting my lower lip. I had never had to consider integral heavies before and the intellectual challenge diverted me…just like he knew it would. The problem was that the Arrow IV carried by the _Padilla_ had half the range of the _Marksman_'s Sniper Artillery Piece. Both were tracked, but the _Marksman_ was almost twenty klicks slower than the _Pads_. The _Chaparrals_ were good, but they were as slow as the _Marksman_, carried fewer missiles than the _Padilla_s, and were already experienced with the ground squadrons that they'd have to be diverted from. I didn't want the _Long Toms_ either, they might be even longer-ranged than the _Marksmen_, but not only were they more experienced with their existing organization but they were lucky to travel thirty klicks in an hour, not including setup and takedown time. The _Thors_ were a nice design and I was almost tempted to ask for them because their twin medium lasers might make their crews a bit more cautious about getting close to the enemy than those of the _Marksman_ with their single large laser, but their wheeled chassis posed problems in too many terrain conditions and I was more concerned about the missile carriers that would be closer to the front.

"Thank you," I said after finally. "But I think I'll stick with the _Padillas_ and maybe some _Marksmen_, if you can find some for me. If necessary the _Pads_ can light up targets for themselves, and the _Marks_ at least have more range to play with."

"I'll see about cutting you four of each, a full battery, plus an ammo carrier for each," he said. "We'll land them with Headquarters and I'll chop my _Long Toms_ to you until you get close enough at which point I'll swap them back, fair?"

"We're going to be executing a hot drop then?" I asked warily. It was possible to wrap a tank or IFV in a drop cocoon, but it wasn't a pod-form that was cross-compatible with a 'mech and most were awkwardly shaped which made cargo masters unhappy. Very few people ever bothered.

"Not exactly," he told me. "You remember those XM-113 drop cocoons we picked up at that depot a ways back?"

"The super stealth pods that we never got to work?" I asked.

"Well," he said, "it turns out that the Fleet technical boys figured out how to work the things just before the Liberation of Terra. Since we didn't have a use for them on that drop they sort of forgot to mention it to us. But now here we are, and we have something useful we can do with them. They have an advanced carbon-boride construction and a stealth coating, very powerful—though short duration—ECM burst emitters, and have large thrusters on one end. Enough to make a very hot de-orbit burn. I'm going to put your battalion, plus the 'mech companies from two of the squadrons in them, and then we're going to drop you on these Woofies' ass."

"And if they pack up and go home first?"

"Then we'll recover you and save it for another surprise," he said.

I stared at him for a moment. "I don't like it, Sir."

"You don't have to like it, you just have to do it," he said. "You're senior, you'll have tactical control until you break through to the Regiment. We'll come up with a few other things to do when we figure out where the battle is going to be if you can't, probably take a note out of the Leatherneck handbook and have you disappear into the sea.

"I've had the troops 'mech lances robbed to bring the squadron 'mech companies up to full strength, fourteen 'mechs in each, three lances and a command element," he went on. "Those, taken with your eighteen, makes for forty-six 'mechs—darn near our total authorized 'mech compliment without your battalion." He paused for a moment, then smiled. "Make that fifty-two 'mechs. I'll let you have both the _Prowlers_ and one of the incendiary lances that the engineers are bringing."


	5. Chapter 5

Location: In low-orbit above Planting  
Time: Now

ARE YOU OKAY?

I blinked awake, rubbing the fuzziness out of my eyes and scanned my darkened cockpit.

ARE YOU OKAY?

I stared at the words on the primary display for a moment before clearing my throat. "I'm fine, _Bun Bun_."

YOUR BRAIN WAVES SUGGEST OTHERWISE.

I sighed, reminding myself not for the first time about the futility of trying to lie to a machine who knows your brain waves better than you do. The diagnostic interpretation computer wasn't, strictly speaking, what people had spent centuries calling an AI (the fact that what they were calling AI was actually Artificial _Sentience_ was neither here nor there). What is was, was an Expert System which like all ESes, was really only good at one thing—in this case diagnosing the input generated by the pilot and interpreting (hence the name) it into movements that would actually accomplish something other than a rather spectacular (and equally unproductive) crash.

Like Expert Systems of any flavor there was some learning curve. It wasn't just the 'mech-jock gaining experience with a new 'mech, but the DI gaining experience with the 'mech-jock as well. There might be some customization involved, such as to lead with a particular foot when stationary that would allow for a faster break in a particular direction, but a lot of the work was done by the DI without prompting or programming having learned from 'its' pilot. The classic example, a recon 'mech dodging trees while running at flank speed through a dense forest, was more the DI's automatic avoidance programming than it was piloting skill (well, not quite, since it took a fair amount of skill to let the _DI_ handle avoiding the trees and resist the urge to override it and try to do the job yourself).

The DIs the Cav had were the best I'd ever seen. Not only did they adjust faster (and were even better at their jobs) than normal SLDF DIs, but they actually registered on the sentience scale. Not very high on the scale, they averaged somewhat below Earth's dolphins, but they were on it. Since they knew what 'their' pilot's brain waves were supposed to look like they also knew when something was wrong, if not precisely what that 'something' was, and someone somewhere along the line had decided that giving the little black boxes a way of interacting with their pilots was a good idea.

WHAT WERE YOU DREAMING OF?

I rolled my eyes. "The drop on Terra."

Pause. THAT WAS NOT AS BAD AS THE COUP.

I shivered. "Yes," I agreed, remembering the sight of mushroom clouds rising over Unity City where the Usurper had used nukes against the individual battalion bases, taking most of the Royal Blackwatch's war gear out in the span of seconds. The 3rd Republic Guard opening fire on the ready-duty battalion asleep in their barracks. Fighters screaming down to bomb infantry formations, and fire-bomb Sherman Potter SLDF (Royal Blackwatch) Medical Hospital. Hanni Schmitt gathering the survivors on the Gorst Flats and standing off the 4th Amaris Dragoons to buy MacIntosh time to pull out the twins. The running fight to the hidden _Abyss_ that cost the Major his life, and those of two-thirds of his small command…

_Bun Bun_ reporting the seismic event as Amaris nuked the Colonel.

"Yes," I said again, slowly. "The coup was…bad." Even after almost fifteen years, _Bun Bun_ could be surprising. Objectively I knew it was because deep in its processing chips a program had just run, comparing casualty counts, duration, ammunition and fuel expenditures, damage, and a host of other variables, decided which one was statistically 'worse' and then phrased it in an almost human-like manner. Subjectively, on the other hand, if _Bun Bun_ used contractions the entire exchange would not have been out of place for two old war-buddies trading stories over a couple of beers.

YOU ARE STILL UNWELL, _Bun Bun_ noted.

"I'm fine," I said again. "Why don't you…play some music or something."

Obediently, something with a lot of strings and brasses, but no electronics, written by some composer I didn't know but who was long dead started to play. Pre-space classical music wasn't something I particularly enjoyed, but then _Bun Bun_ hadn't picked it because it was in my favorites-folder. It had picked the piece because it analyzed the disturbances in my brainwaves, ran a statistical comparison of the effects of any given piece of music, and chosen something that would guide my brainwaves back towards statistical normal.

I absolutely loathed the piece, but I did feel better.

After a moment of contemplating the DI's choice of music and the possibility of some reprogramming I flipped up my kneeboard and once more reviewed the plan such as it was. We still didn't know where—or even if—an appropriate target was going to open up, and I couldn't ask anyone for info without transmitting and giving away my position. Someone on the ground was supposed to be watching and then the Colonel would squirt us a message and give us a Go-order.

The 'mechs of the two 'mech companies that had been detached were mostly lightweight mediums and I'd thrown together a few basic set-piece movements in the time we'd had available. Two of the Cyberpunks had come with 'mechs and Colonel Chaffee had given them to me. They were disturbing-looking machines with a vaguely sinister feel; chicken-legged, sloped-shouldered, and beak-faced machines that looked like malevolent birds. They were fast, and had impressive jumping capability, and practically no weapons as nearly half their mass given over to huge suites of electronic warfare gear. They would provide cover by making a hash of the Woofie electronics…or that was the idea. To round out my 'mech force the Colonel had detached a lance of combat engineers with _Firestarters_. Technically fire- and smoke-screens were the job of the chemical-troops, but since they were never equipped with 'mechs it was a job that the engineers did.

There were also two Marine Mobile Infantry platoons in orbit with me. They all had _Aquahawks_ which pretty much restricted them to water environments, but their SSVs landed with the support element of the Regiment and should be prepping a couple of battlefields for them.

I flipped to another card on my kneeboard, this one with the rules of engagement. The Woofies apparently used ROE that turned a battle into a bunch of honor-duels like those that the Dracs liked, but I'd never heard of the Dracs having a bunch of them simultaneously. It was, at least in my opinion, an insane way to fight a battle. Dropships were allowed to land uncontested, there was no use (or at least restricted use) of artillery, if one side had a disproportionate number of 'mechs they would stand aside until their side won or one of their number lost and a new one would take the fallen 'mech's place. The whole thing was crazy, but General Winters had confirmed that our units would operate under ROE Zeta (or so they had been named) until the other side broke it, which meant that they were the rules that Task Group Dagger—I thought 'task group' was a bit grand for a heavy battalion, but nobody asked me—was going to fight and die by.

"Rules of Engagement: Zeta," I said, familiarizing myself with the rules of engagement yet again. "Specification one, each warrior shall issue a challenge to a single enemy warrior—"


	6. Chapter 6

Location: Planting System  
Flag Bridge: _Snow Lair _(_Overlord_-class Command Dropship) Clan Wolf  
Time: Twelve hours before

Garth Radick resisted the urge to tap his fingers on the arn of his acceleration couch and sigh. This was not because he felt any respect for the man on the other side of the video-link (he did not), nor was it to mask his impatience (which he had a great deal of). No, he resisted the urge because whenever he did tap his fingers or sighed it made him resemble a member of the scientist-caste—usually one of the stuffy kind that helped educate other scientist-caste—in one of the mindless visual-media shows that the labor-caste loved.

That particular role, like so many other things, had been carefully preserved by the clans since the Exodus even though proper warriors had little use for contemporary tri-vids aside from a few documentaries of significant persons (almost always military leaders) or events (almost always either wars or battles). Garth _had_ seen a number of the old tri-vids—carefully preserved in modern databanks—that had been brought with the SLDF when they left the Inner Sphere, but always felt some discomfort when he did so. The warriors in those tri-vids were always big, robust, good-looking men and women, and sometimes he wondered if the original scientists in charge of the eugenics program had used those characters as an end-goal since the warriors of the Clans of Kerensky _were_ big, robust, and good-looking.

Well…_most_ warriors were.

Garth himself was short and stout. Instead of rugged good looks his were, at best, non-descript aside from a boyishly infectious smile and thinning hair which made him look _exactly_ like one of those labor-caste imagined scientists. He could live with the smile, after all one didn't actually _need_ to smile, but male-pattern baldness? In the Clans? In Clan _Wolf_? And worse there were only so many ways of disguising it, especially with the unfortunate consequences of micro-gravity. It really was not fair. Even in the pond of degenerate scum that the Inner Sphere had become males rarely started going bald before thirty five.

He sighed at the blank look the other man gave him over the video link once he'd finished explaining the rules of _Zellbrigen_. Garth could not blame him for not knowing all the ritual intricacies of _Zellbrigen_ since it was something the Founder had given His Clans well after they had left the Inner Sphere, but the man's ignorance was truly amazing. There might be one yokel on some remote rock in the back-end of nowhere that did not know that the Star League had fallen and that the SLDF had left on Exodus (he would not have wagered on there being two), but he could not imagine such a person ever ending up in command of a fleet without learning some very basic history. And that did not even begin to cover the sheer _gall_ required to wear the uniform of the Star League Defense Force! Even the Clans did not wear those uniforms, nor would they until Terra was liberated by the Clan that would become ilClan and usher in the era of the Star League Remade.

Garth tried to remind himself that their ignorance was not their fault. That it was the fault of their forefathers who had brought the Star League low and forced the Great Father to abandon the Inner Sphere when they refused to see His wisdom. But it was so much harder than he had expected. It was not just any one thing that they did, but a whole host of little things and the man in the com-screen before him was a prime example of it. Their wearing of uniforms they had not the right to, the ways in which they had dishonored those uniforms by hanging their own awards and badges on them, the way they allowed contractions to corrupt their speech…

And it was not limited to the man before him, though if he was indicative of the rest of his like they were by far the worst that he had encountered to date. The heresies the Smoke Jaguars had claimed, that the Inner Sphere was on the way of reuniting itself and the spread of Star League technologies had been proven correct. The presence of a regimental combat team of Avalon Hussars (albeit and under-strength one) here in the Lyrian Commonwealth was evidence enough of the first claim. Coupled with the theft of Star League knowledge by the New Avalon Institute of Science, he found himself in the position of having to admit that the Smoke Jaguars and the Jade Falcons were correct. It was a galling thing for a Clan Wolf Warrior, one of the True Heirs of the Founder, to find that he agreed more with a moldy turkey than he did his own Khan.

It was almost more than an honest Warrior could bear.

However, most of his clan agreed with Khan Ulric Kerensky and the weak-spined, so-called 'Warden' clans. Listening to his Khan harp away about 'saving' the idiots scum was bad enough—who, exactly Ulric thought they needed saving from was something the Khan had never really explained, but Garth was pretty sure that was because if he _was_ forced to give a definitive answer he would be hard pressed to not agree with Garth, that the people they needed saving from was themselves. The fact that Clan Wolf had showed itself superior to any two, any _three_, other clans simply by number of planets liberated only _proved_ what the ilKhan had said. But Ulric—Khan or no he didn't _deserve_ his bloodname, certainly not the name of the Great Father himself—twisted the facts like a mealy-mouthed _merchant_ was almost worst. The way Ulric had berated Star Colonel Ramon Sender after the later had tried to satisfy his Khan's unreasonable orders to 'conserve the Clan's fighting strength' had almost been enough for Garth to call the Khan out in a Trial of Grievance. True enough that Star Colonel Sender's actions were unbecoming of a Clan Warrior, especially one of Clan Wolf, but he had dealt with the matter himself and in private and it should have been left there. There was no need for _Khan_ Ulric to publicly humiliate the Star Colonel. Still, he was saKhan of Clan Wolf; he would bear it because he must.

And only for as long as he must.

One day, hopefully soon, he would have enough of his supporters in place to drag his clan away from Ulric's perverse way of thinking. He would open their eyes, and the sweetest thing of all was that it would be Ulric's strategy that would make them the ilClan. It might come even sooner than that, there was a war going on after all and people died in wars. In that…_unfortunate_, but happy, turn of events he would have plenty of time to correct his Clan's errors while they pressed on to Terra. And if Ulric were ever so foolish as to offer an open insult, he would relish the Trial of Grievance to follow.

Idly imaging Ulric's _Gargoyle_ in the targeting reticule of his 'mech while the two men prattled away, Garth Radick reached for the computer at his command station…

Compared to the Central Computer Complex on Strana Mechty that held the whole of the knowledge of the Clans, or even the computer that held just the knowledge of Clan Wolf, the computers of his _Black Lion_-class flagship were quite limited on storage volume. On the other hand, the original hardware and compression algorithms used by the SLDF were still in use and the Clans in general had removed very little from their computer banks, preferring instead to expand them as needed and Garth Radick typed in a request for data for the techs to run down for him. He glared slightly as he realized that in his distraction he had initiated a 'search all sources' query instead of limiting it to the reports from the Dragoons, the Watch, or information sources established since Operation Revival began.

He turned back as he finished giving a complete breakdown of his entire order of battle out of reflex. "Of course," he continued with a sneer, "Only the Silver Keshik and the Command Supernova and Battle Trinary of the 341st Assault Cluster will be used to affect the conquest of this planet."

"Let me get this straight," 'Lieutenant' General Richard—Garth was not about to dignify him with a surname—said. Why the man used the inferior rank when he wore the stars of a _Major_ General, Garth Radick could not understand. It was probably some kind of insult, but it was equally likely that it was just another expression of the man's ignorance.

"In this 'Trial of Possession' thing, each side tries to undercut the other, so as to win with the least forces. Actual battles are no more than a bunch of simultaneous one-on-one duels unless someone shoots someone on the other side—or even their own—that they _aren't_ supposed to be dueling, at which point it devolves into a mob shooting at each other at point-blank ranges?"

"A gross simplification of _zellbrigen_," Garth Radick said, forcing his voice to remain level, "but yes."

"And what do we get if we win?"

"Excuse me?" he asked.

"Well, according to you, if you win this trial-thingy you get the planet, right?" Richard asked.

"Yes, of course," Garth said, moderately pleased with himself for having managed to educate the man on this one small thing.

Richard crossed his arms. "We already _have_ the planet, or the people on it have it which amounts to much the same thing from our perspective. It doesn't seem right to me that we should stand to lose this planet unless you've got something to lose if we win."

"You may name a prize of equal or lesser value, as is the right of the Defender in a Trial of Possession," Garth acknowledged.

"Good," Richard said with a smile, "I want your planet."

"You want _what_?" Garth blurted.

"Your planet," Richard said. "It only seems reasonable to me. Our planet for yours. Winner takes all, collectable at time of defeat."

"You are talking about a _planet_," Garth said slowly. "It is not exactly something one can carry around in a hip-pocket much less bring through a KF-jump."

"I suppose you're right," Richard mused. "Oh well, in that case I'll just settle for the coordinates of your planet and guarantee that you'll move your people off it. I figure you probably have a hyper-com, but I'll be generous and give you a full standard week to move your combatants off it starting at the time of our arrival in-system, that means they can use the time we're in transit as well. I'll even let you take any civs you want, but you have to leave behind any war material and can't sabotage your factories and the like."

"A properly industrialized world has hardly the value of an agricultural planet," Garth said.

"True…unless you're operating at the end of a very long supply chain, or some disease is spreading through your livestock like air out of a hull-breach, or you have insects eating your grain before you have a chance to harvest. A factory turning out battlemechs doesn't do you much good if you don't have anything to feed your army and starvation, I understand, is a bad way to go."

Richard paused for a moment, then grinned. "Still, under the circumstances I suppose you might have a point about the relevant wealth of the worlds in question. I won't ask for _your_ primary Ag world since we both know that you'll restrict your food stocks to keep your soldiers going strong and the civs can hang, and _I_ have never made it a policy to go after non-combatants unless I'm not left with any other choice."

Garth bristled at the implied insult, but the spheroid kept talking without a chance for him to interject.

"Since I'm feeling inclined to reasonableness," Richard drawled. "Heck, I'm being generous considering I could just land my whole ground force, stomp whatever you've got into the dirt, take your ships and anything I find of value including the locations of your home planets and go and conquer them on my own. So I'm here willing to cut you a deal. This planet, Ag-world as you pointed out, up against a single entry from your astrogation banks. The three-dimensional reference coordinates of your capital world in relationship to Terra."

The mere coordinates of a world, especially one as distant as Strana Mechty, were arguably of less value than an entire planet, especially a planet that would considerably ease concerns about food supply for his Clan. In fact, given the local astrography they could well end up selling food to the green turkeys and was _that_ not a fond thought? But he could well imagine the Khan' and ilKhan's response when he presented his victory report, and if he were to actually _lose_…

"I think not," Garth said. "I offer any supplies and military equipment that remain on the battlefield."

"We'll take them as spoils of war anyway," Richard said with a shrug. "I'm afraid I must insist."

"I really can not," Garth said. "There were security precautions taken, you understand. The journey here was accomplished in several legs. At each one several astrogation experts boarded and wiped the last leg from our databanks before uploading the next one. Not even the personnel at the waypoints have the complete databank. It is not simply a matter of not wishing to provide the data. I am unable to do so no matter how I feel about it."

"My, how reasonable a security precaution," Richard told him. "How…unfortunate it seems to have left you unable to meet your own responsibilities in this…trial of yours."

"The Trial of Possession states something that both sides find something of similar value, but it also assumes that in each case it is something that both sides are able to provide," Garth said.

"You didn't say that earlier," Richard objected, "but I'll play your game. If we win I want all of your jump-capable ships."

"How ever would you crew them?" Garth asked with a laugh.

"I imagine I could scrape up crews somewhere if I looked hard enough…and I'd scuttle those I couldn't crew," Richard replied. "I could honestly care less about the ships. You have now annoyed me. Here I am, willing to be perfectly reasonable to conform to _your_ way of doing things, and you rule-lawyer me and twist out of it when you don't like my answer. So now I'm inclined to be a bit less reasonable-like. But since I am a generous man by nature, and because I don't like killing people who don't stand a fair and fighting chance because their boss is an idiot, I'll let you put the crews off before I blow them up. I've always found nukes to make most efficient scuttling charges."

Garth blanched, so badly surprised that the personal insult didn't even register. He could not be serious. He could not have just said that he would _destroy_ jumpships out of hand. The idea was so far removed from civilized behavior that he had trouble comprehending it. Even the degenerate Spheroids didn't wantonly destroy jump-capable vessels; they were too rare, too costly, and too necessary for life-sustaining trade.

"I offer two omnimechs, configured in any way you choose," Garth said, his voice hoarse with shock.

"I don't care what super-armor they have, or miracle weapons they're armed with," Richard said flatly. "No two 'mechs of any class are worth an entire agricultural world. Let alone one as centrally located spatially as Planting is. I want the coordinates of four of your logistical bases."

And they had more than enough firepower to destroy the bases and their extremely limited defenses should he lose. The clan would be hard-pressed to move them—and such action would hardly be considered honorable—but it would be impossible to relocate them in time for them to be used, which meant that the next round of attacks would have to be delayed. While throwing off Ulric's precious schedule had a certain amount of appeal, he had worked to hard to make certain it worked despite Ulric's unreasonable demands to risk disrupting it. Nor would the humiliation before the other Khans be at all welcome, and such a setback might be just the thing that that kitten-born ilKhan needed to stop them from using the very same tactic that Garth fully intended to use to take Terra.

"Four omnimechs and ten suits of battle armor," he said.

"Hmmm, you seem awfully enamored with the number five, judging from your TO&E," Richard said. "How about twenty percent of your landing force and an oath that the clan will never again try to conquer Planting. One 'mech for every lance, uh, _star_ of them you land on the planet. Also one point of battle armor for every star of battle armor, one point of aerospace fighters for every star of aerospace fighters, one point of combat and support vehicles for every star of combat and support vehicles that are combatants. This will carry on and go up to and include dropships and warships, but not jumpships—any jumpship that becomes a combatant will count towards the dropship total _unless_ it is destroyed in the fighting in which case it will not count towards any combatant total. In all cases it will be a model and, um, configuration—you said?—of our choosing, but in no case can a 'mech, fighter, vehicle, shuttle, or dropship be heavier than the heaviest unit in the star it represents.

"You can define what units belong to a star when a unit-type isn't organized into a complete star of its own such as in the case of your dropships, but we get to pick which unit we want. A combatant will be defined as any vessel that enters the atmosphere, launches aerospace fighters, disgorges landing shuttles, deploys drop pods or otherwise takes part in combat or makes an action that would assist combat units, whether by deploying decoys, providing logistic support _except_ when that support consists _solely_ of medical treatment, or other unspecified actions. The material turned over to us will be exclusive of any material captured."

He thought for a moment, and then added, "Rounding up to the next star, of course."

Garth Radick hesitated. That was nine brand-new omnimechs, 15 suits of elemental armor, and a quartet of omnifighters for his engagement force, and if he brought in the whole cluster and…no, he said _landed_, not fought, which meant he had to delay putting in the logistics base instead of using the 3rd or risk having to hand over a very short, very mixed cluster of his best equipment.

Which did not even begin to consider the dropships.

Worse still, it played nicely into clan customs for reducing waste. The onus was entirely on him to minimize the forfeiture he'd pay if he lost, and would penalize him more for additional troops he brought in and lost anyway. He wanted to reject it out of hand because this…man had come up with it, but he could not. Not without raising unwelcome questions by Ulric.

"Very well," he agreed. "Bargained well and done."

"Excellent, in that case, while I can't speak for the Avalon Hussars, I'll place a cavalry regiment at the planet's defense. The Third Cav, Brave Rifles. It's a bit under-strength I'm afraid—combat losses, I'm sure you understand. I've assigned them some reinforcements though, to make up for it, a battalion of hover-vehicles, some extra artillery, some engineers and MPs, a couple of platoons of Marines, a service and support company, things like that. It's a dragoon formation organized in the classic late-period North American pattern with—"

"I am quite aware of SLDF organization of combat units," Garth Radick said as he punched in another query. "I will grant you safecon, and allow your ground forces to land without harassment or assault by my aerospace, dropship, or ground forces."

"And I'll do the same," General Winters agreed. "I'll also keep my WarShips out of it, except the assault transports that are to deliver my ground forces and who will have orders to not fire unless fired upon, and the hospital ship _Mercy_ which will enter a widely separate orbit. I'm sure her docs will patch up your people too, if you want. _Mercy_, her dropships, and designated medevac small craft are non-combatants. If any of your boys and girls light her up I'll drop my whole ground force on your head and let Admiral Murakama use your jumpships for target practice."

"You can move your hospital ship in, if you wish," Garth Radick told him, "but only so long as my warriors can conduct inspections to make certain she really is a medical ship."

"You're boys are welcome to all the inspections they want…so long as they don't disrespect the docs, medical personnel, or her crew, and don't interfere with her operations," Winters told him. "Oh, and so long as they don't try anything stupid like trying to seize her, or try to plant weapons aboard her so that they can claim she was violating her status as a hospital ship, or something."

Garth Radick bit back a sharp retort at the insult, but inside he seethed with rage. "Of course," he said coldly.

"Are you sure you don't want a _complete_ TO&E of my designated forces?" Winters asked with a smirk. "I'm sure I can find you a list of all their issued gear as well down to the regulation number of socks they should have, and if your troops are anything like mine you know how dangerous a sock can be."

"Thank you, Sir, I do not," he seethed. "Bargained well and done, _General_," he added, and then closed the channel.

Somewhere on the bridge a computer beeped.

"saKhan," A tech said respectfully, "I have some of the data you requested."

Radick glared at the man, but unstrapped himself from his command couch and kicked to send himself gliding across the bridge. He grabbed onto a bar, anchored for that purpose to the tech's console, to still himself. "Yes?"

"The _Mercy_ is a _Comfort_-class hospital ship," the technician told him. "It is one of the fleet train elements the SLDF Naval-branch constructed by extensively refitting the _Quixote_-class. The most famous of the refits are the—"

"_Volga_-class transports," Garth Radick said testily.

"Yes, saKhan," the technician agreed. "One of the refits was to equip six drop collars instead of the normal four. Normally they hold dropships that were specially fitted out with medical facilities.

"However," he touched a control and four ships appeared side-by-side, "there are four sub-classes of the base _Comfort_. In the case of the _Serenity_ sub-class there is a large amount of tonnage given over to refugee supplies and transport for engineers as the class is designed to respond to natural disasters. _Mercy_'s name suggests that it should be a part of the base class and fitted purely as a military hospital ship."

"Should be?" Garth asked, his eyes narrowing.

"I do not know, saKhan," the technician said. "As I said, the naming conforms to the convention of the base _Comfort_-class, but the computer says that _Mercy_ was refitted as a _Serenity_-type and that all further information is classified, the classification as a _Serenity_-type does not conform to naming conventions and is a point of conflict. It is an old classification code, saKhan, Star League Defense Force-era of a kind I have never seen."

Garth Radick frowned, then leaned over the technician's shoulder, highlighted the _Mercy_, and tapped in a long string of alphanumerics. While many of the senior command codes had been lost, first in the fighting against the Usurper, and then in those traitors who had refused to follow the Great Father, and then again those who had refused to join the Second Exodus, a great many had been retained. The twenty that were most senior were reserved for each Clans Khan or saKhan, and the Great Father's command codes were reserved for the ilKhan when one was appointed. Still, his own codes should have been sufficient but the computer rejected them out of hand.

"Very well," he said testily. "What else do we know?"

"Very little about the hospital ship, saKhan, but I did get one hit on the historical archives. According to the archives, the _Mercy_ was assigned to Task Group TH-X1138 during the Hegemony Campaign, even before the Rim Worlds had been defeated," the technician said. "Shortly after the liberation of Terra, before the Exodus, TH-X1138 was reported as lost with all hands. However, there was one survivor of TH-X1138, a ground-force Colonel who was briefly assigned to the Great Father's Headquarters in a liaison role shortly before its loss and retired almost immediately after. There is no information about the purpose of the liaison mission which was terminated shortly after when the liaison tendered her resignation, only the name of the liaison herself. Her name was Elizabeth Hazen."

Garth blinked. "The Jade Falcon founder?" he asked incredulously.

"The same."

"Why would she have been assigned to a task group?" he asked. "She was part of the resistance movement against the Usurper on Terra."

The technician had a personnel jacket already highlighted and he brought up the relevant portion with a touch of a finger.

"Elizabeth Hazen," he said. "Promoted to Captain. Selected for Royal Blackwatch Regiment. Passed Blackwatch Indoctrination and placed in charge of a company of battlemechs. This section here is about the insurgency," the tech continued, skipping past a long block of text. "Liberation. Promoted to Colonel, assigned Commanding Officer, Royal Blackwatch Regiment. Post transfer, Task Group TH-X1138. Detached for Temporary Duty as Liaison to the Office of Commanding General, Star League Defense Force Grand Army Headquarters. Then three days later put in for retirement."

The saKhan of Clan Wolf frowned slightly. The records left him with only more questions and very few answers. There could not have been enough Blackwatch survivors to staff an infantry star, let alone a full regiment. Besides, there were no Camerons left alive and so no need for a Blackwatch Regiment. Yet such a regiment had been formed, and then for unknown reasons transferred to this unknown task group.

"Well it appears as though _Mercy_ was not destroyed as believed," he said at length. "Somebody probably found and salvaged it…do the other vessels match those of Task Group TH-X1138?"

"There is no listing of vessels so assigned that I have found so far," the technician said. "Nor have I found any other reference to TH-X1138. If I may speculate, the complete lack of other information would suggest that the data you seek was purged."

Garth scowled.

"I do have information on the other two searches you requested."

"Show me the one of this unit," Garth decided.

"There were several units designated 'third' in the Star League Defense Force," the technician said. "There was a mechanized infantry division, for example. The most famous unit so designated was the 3rd regimental combat team, which is commonly known as the—"

"Eridani Light Horse, whom these people are _not_, technician," Garth said testily.

"Yes, saKhan," the technician agreed. "But 'cavalry regiment' is not a proper designation, nor is 'dragoon-formation'. There _were_ regiments designated as dragoon regiments, but not dragoon cavalry regiments or combinations thereof."

"A corruption," Garth said. "Like the uniforms they wear."

"Perhaps, saKhan," the technician said, "but there are three things I should point out. First, he described them as being organized in a 'classic late-period North American Pattern'. Two, there are no SLDF units that were known as the 'Brave Rifles'. And three, I have found a unit designated the 3d cavalry regiment that _was_ known as the Brave Rifles. It is a historical unit, saKhan, from North America that dates back to the mid-nineteenth century and was in existence in one form or another until the creation of the Star League at when many of the historical Terran military units that had survived well into the period of the Terrain Alliance were disbanded to create the Royal units."

"Historical units?" Garth asked. "Such as the Remembrance patches that Gamma Galaxy wears?"

"Yes, saKhan, which is what made me think of expanding my search parameters when the initial results came back without any hits," the tech said.

"Tell me about these historical units," Garth said.

The technician shrugged, "I have no data on TO&E, but many are simply units that could trace their lineage back to units that had existed well before spaceflight. The Royal Blackwatch descended from one of these units; an infantry unit, originally, but there is no information on how or why it was selected above the others to become the First Lord's bodyguard unit. It was neither the oldest nor most decorated, though it was among the top of both categories."

"So you are telling me that I face a military formation from five centuries ago that is in possession of a medical ship that was lost two and a half centuries ago, quineg?"

"Aff," the technician said reluctantly.

Garth started to respond, but a light blinked.

"The computer has generated results for the personnel searches you requested," the technician said hurriedly, opening the results.

A pair of holos, the kind used for official identification appeared with the usual array of numbers for height, weight, and age.

"Facial comparison analysis says that these two are the same people you were speaking to, but that is not beyond the skill of a skilled reconstructive surgeon. Further, while the faces match the uniforms and ranks do not, and these files are from the original SLDF-database. This 'Lieutenant General Richard' you talked to was a Major when he retired from the SLDF Marine-branch where he had served with distinction, well before the Usurper murdered the First Lord. Were 'Lieutenant General Richard Winters', and 'Major Richard Winters' the same person, he would be over three and a quarter centuries old."

"A point," Garth agreed slowly. "Definitely a point." He considered for a moment. "Very well, Technician—" he glanced down at the man's nameplate, "—Logan, good job. See if you can clear up the rest for me."

"Yes, saKhan!"


	7. Chapter 7

**Chapter 7**

Location: In low orbit above Planting  
Time: Approximately H-hour+50:00

_Bun Bun_ bleeped at me as it receipted a signal from the ground. Planting didn't have a whole lot of industrial real estate, but the Woofies had decided to go after what little there was, principally the Dantron-Sontor-Belex tri-city area. There wasn't much to it, really. There was Dantron which was the real heart of the agri-industrial complexes, Sontor (the chief sea port), and Belex (chief space-port). All three were separated by a large, slow-moving river named (not particularly imaginatively) Dantron Meander that generally ran north to south, and split into two somewhat smaller rivers before joining the ocean.

I yawned, stretched as best as I was able, which basically amounted to pushing against the straps holding me into the command couch and trying not to accidentally hit something important like, say, the ejection controls. An unsecured meal bar drifted by, and I briefly contemplated a snack before rejecting it. Unlike some poor bastards micro-grav had never given me a problem, and I could even choke down field-rats when I had to. But even the hardiest belly—or most desperate—hesitated at the thought of consuming one of the things while micro-grav played tricks on their inner ear.

I settled for a sip of water instead and pulled up the latest intelligence update. Nothing particularly remarkable compared to what had been coming our way the last two days. The woofies had 'mechs that were very fast and very well armed for their rates, even better than what the Fat Man's boys fielded after they got their hands on Hegemony-tech. Not really surprising that the locals were freaked by these guys, all things considered.

They also had battle armor in quantity which was something of a surprise, but after two and a half centuries it would have been more surprising if someone _hadn't_ had battle armor. As it was, the Woofie's 'toads'—as the locals were apparently calling them—seemed to be proving every estimate of the value of battle armor infantry in general deployment wrong.

The estimates were clearly low.

But despite their use of battle armor they didn't seem to utilize combined arms doctrine worth a damn. Nobody had seen any combat or support vehicle yet, though it was possible they were being held back for some reason. There were no infantry aside from the battle armor, though they at least seemed to be using the 'mechs as a kind of mechanized cavalry mount (no pun intended). There were no VTOLs, vertols, or dedicated close-air support, and what aerospace fighters they had seemed to be super-effective general-purpose designs rather than dedicated fighter, dedicated ground-attack, dedicated ground-support designs. There certainly was no evidence of an air-mobile doctrine. And what little artillery support they had seemed to be sporadic at best.

That was worth some serious thinking. Battlemechs were widely regard back home—and even more, apparently, these days—as the ultimate weapon system. Other systems, tanks, infantry, fighters, could support them, but nothing except another mech could equal them. This was a view widely believed by four diverse, but somewhat overlapping, groups of people. The first were politicians (many of whom were former 'mech-jocks) and newsies who—if not already inducted into the Cult of Mech—took one look at the price tag of one 'mech, blanched, and then said that they had better well _be_ the ultimate weapon system. The second was the holo-vid industry, and included everyone who was in or worked for the industry. The third included everyone who had seen the products of populations group two, or read or listened to the drivel from population group one.

Population Group Four, it should come as no surprise, were the 'mech-jocks themselves.

Like so many idiots before them they took a few general statements, proclaimed it fact, from which it became Gospel Truth.

Was a battlemech a highly effective weapon system? Yes. Was a battlemech a cost-effective way of deploying massive amounts of fire-power? Also yes. Was the battlemech The Ultimate Weapon™? No, but then I'd never passed the entry requirements for the Cult of Mech because I'd done a tour in the infantry almost two decades and two hundred fifty years ago.

The truth is that while a tank couldn't carry as much weapons and armor as a mech of the same tonnage, it could hull-down and hide better than any 'mech could. Similarly a tank had a much lower center of gravity—which prevented embarrassing spills and tumbles—and its wide track gave it a better stability than any 'mech (aside from some specialized four-legged models) could hope to possess.

Now, this might not sound like a lot, and in truth it isn't. Until one day a brash young mech-jock is strolling along, and then a M-666B1 _Demon_ pokes its gauss rifle over a berm. Then an army suddenly loses the services of one very expensive mech-jock (training is _not_ cheap), and the use of one extremely-expensive battlemech (at least until the cockpit can be hosed out and the canopy can be replaced, and the _Demon_ is out one 125-kilo slug of ferrous nickel-iron alloy.

Likewise if you need to secure a building as opposed to blowing it up, or need to identify every left-handed red-head in a village, you need infantry. The lowliest and simplest of all military personnel, but if you take away all of their expensive toys, what is any soldier but infantry?

Of course, _real_ infantry are cold-blooded conscienceless killers. Professional thugs writ large. Masters of up-close in-your-face violence. Most mech-jocks can delude themselves into some sort of neo-classical knight-errantry, but the infantry knows the truth. We're all of us bastards.

Which brought me back to my observation about their tactics. Combined arms were, and are, used for one simple reason. They work. My biggest concern—well, one of them—was that in limiting myself to only 'mechs without most supporting units, my unit would have a glaring weakness that could be exploited. Since these woofies didn't seem to combined-arms it meant that they, in turn, could be made to work against them. A ten-meter-plus 'mech was a huge target compared to a tank that _might_ manage to hit the two-meter mark…_before_ it hulled-down in the dirt.

I stretched again, winced in sympathy for the Marines who didn't have as much room to move about as I did, and thumbed another page onto the display. Still nothing as to why—

_Bun Bun_ bleeped an annoyed beep and pulled up a different page.

More DropShips were heading down from orbit. What looked like another one of those weird battalion-regiment things they used, and the remainder of the first one they had already put on the ground.

"Okay, _Bun Bun_," I said. "Low intensity pulse the rest of the people up here. System check, standby for drop information."

_Bun Bun_ flashed an acknowledgement to let me know that its cybertronic brain had properly compared my words to its library database and had properly decided what I wanted it to do, while I consulted a map.

Over the last two days or so Colonel Chaffee and this Steiner-guy in charge of the 41st—and time-jump or no, would _someone_ tell me what the hell a FedSuns formation was doing Lyrian periphery-way?—had deliberately sucked the Woofies into one prepared ambush after another, including one running ambush that had started with a general retreat under fire and ended with a counter-charge by hover armor at their flanks, as they more or less circled around the cities. The river itself was deep enough for deep-hull merchant vessels to navigate well up past Dantron, but it broke into a delta south of Sondor that was a mixed batch of swamps and bogs and general unpleasentness. The deep channels were still there, but the countryside was a nightmare.

The Wolves held the starport at Belex on the west side of the river. In fact they now held the entire west side, and were pursuing the Colonel and Steiner across the east and south towards Sondor. It was pretty clear that Steiner had anticipated that they might turn him and had laid in more surprises, but if something wasn't done the Woofies were going to pin him against the swamps. The problem was that if I kicked off right now we'd be dirt-side before these new Woofies…and then they would pin us between them. I needed to see where they were going to go first.

My mission orders were neatly attached to the tactical briefing. _Land your battalion_… yadda, yadda, yadda…_to enemy rear and conduct relief and operations in support of 41__st__ Avalon Hussars and 3__d__ Cavalry Regiment 'Brave Rifles'…other actions as deemed prudent…_

Well now, 'actions as deemed prudent', huh? Basically it told me I could do what I want if I came up with something better than to attack the back-ass of their attack force…heh, heh, heh.

_Chappie_ was broadcasting its take which let me watch in real time as the Woofie droppers headed for atmo, angling towards the east. Most of them were _Unions_, but there were a set of droppers that didn't have a class-ID but were hanging in formation with a _Titan_-class fighter carrier, as well as a pair of _Leopards_. Probably at least one of the _Unions_ was a command refit.

The _Leopards_ went in first, hot-dropping their 'mechs at minimum altitude and maximum possible speed while still ensuring that the ground troops got down in one piece. It was a fancy bit of flying considering the way having multi-ton cargo shift around like that could screw with the balance of the ship. The bigger _Unions_ made a more sedate approach for their own drop while the fighter carriers barely slowed to release their cargo well in-land over the east side of the river and just north of Sondor in the perfect position to put the friendlies on the ground in a battlemech vise.

"Are we getting an accurate read on their numbers?" I asked.

_Bun Bun_ obediently brought up an estimated force composition, then compared it to the OrBat that Radick had given us. While specific 'mech models (and their statistics) wasn't listed it did contain force sizes and weight classes. After a moment _Bun Bun_ displayed its analysis. All the of the mechanized battle armor was on the east side of Dantron Meander, as were the aerospace fighter covering force—at least for now. But at least one of the reinforced companies of 'mechs was not.

"Looks like they decided to keep a guard force on the droppers," I said out loud. "Was there anything in ROE-Zeta about not attacking rear-echelon troops or droppers?"

_Bun Bun_ flashed a single word on the monitor. SAFECON.

I considered that for a moment, then shook my head. "Doesn't apply. SafeCon grants uncontested landing rights. As soon as they kissed dirt and disembarked their troops they became legitimate targets."

It took me about twenty seconds to rewrite my orders, reprogramming them into the drop cocoon took longer but not much since I simple 'adjusted' our landing point somewhat and reoriented. Picking the landing point was actually easiest because one of the Marine's prepped-battlefields was right smack dab in the middle of the river and I just pick a spot far enough out to give them time to get down and settled in. I spent a little longer on debating whether or not I was exceeding my authority, but I decided I was good to go. The revised OpPlan was squirted over to the rest of my battalion along with a 90-second time hack and then it was simply a matter of waiting for the Woofies to finish their landings.

_Bun Bun_ started the count-down on automatic.

At T-minus-60 seconds a trio of recon sats went active. They centered on the Marines' landing site, scouring it for hostile signatures before sweeping out. It wasn't that the Marine Mobile Infantry was the most important part of my plan—though it was very important—but they were a lot more vulnerable if they hit outside of their primary zone which made making sure that it was clean was vital.

At T-minus-30 seconds the first wave of 'mech and Marine-sized pods boosted for the atmosphere. They went in empty of people, but filled with radar-obscuring chaff, ECM burst transmitters, flares, electro-magnets, and all the other one-thousand-and-one decoys that had been built into them.

A second wave followed it and T-minus-15.

At T-minus-10 seconds _Bun Bun_ lit off her fusion plant. It was still cycling up to full when a kick beneath my buttocks sent me rocketing towards the planet somewhere in the general direction of 'above' me.

The XM-113 drop cocoon was experimental. Even the Royal battlemech units didn't have it yet…had it yet?—I was going to have to figure out my tenses soon. Some aspects of it, such as the enhanced heat dissipation and ablative properties were to be expected. Others weren't. For example, most drop cocoons don't have external engines, instead using aero-braking to get through the primary atmosphere interface and leaving it to the 'mech's jump jets (or strapped on landing boosters) to finish the job. Of those that do, there are only one or two models that have the thrusters to do a major reorientation burn since most designers assume the launching ship will take care of the gross aiming and not need more than minor adjustments.

But one of the things the XM-113 was designed for was a delay drop. The launching ship would put the pods into a low planetary orbit instead of kicking them out in the direction of the planetary surface. In that situation a major shove was needed to get them heading towards the ground in a very short order. Because of the physics involved a 'head-first' shove was optimal for the people riding inside, but then the cocoon would have to reorient to the traditional 'foot-down' landing. I felt the pressure die, and then I was shoved against my command frame as the thrusters shoved the cocoon back around. The cocoon slipped a little and then swayed as the upper atmosphere thickened up enough for me to feel some drag.

My weight started to come up again, mostly on my butt and lower back which meant it was at something of an angle, and I tried not to think of what I had just done. The cocoons (and the 'mechs inside them) are heavy enough that they punch through the upper atmosphere without much dispersion, but there is the lower atmosphere and the cocoons have a _lot_ of surface area for wind to push against, and then there was the rotational velocity of the planet… Technically the cocoon computer was supposed to be able to take designated landing coordinates and info about the planet (rotational velocity, gravity, atmosphere density and composition, and the like) and plot all the engine firing automatically, but to the best of my knowledge it'd never received a full-up test.

Unlike the pod itself we actually had used the computer before, once, but it hadn't been tied into any of our control systems. Instead we had stripped them out of the spare 'stealth pods' and crammed them, and the advanced ECM burst-transmitter each controlled, into standard pods in the hope that it would allow more of us to reach the surface of Terra alive than had been projected. It'd worked too, the battalion had only lost seven people in that drop.

After we kissed dirt it was another story of course.

From the gentle way I entered the atmosphere without much more than a bobble the computer had done its job…so far. The outer ablative skin of the cocoon sloughed off—unevenly since I tumbled a bit and tried not to think about the seventy-five ton 'mech I was strapped in tumbling, but then the rest of it went and I straightened out—and the resistance brakes built into the second layer bit in and the ride got bumpy.

My com-panel was lit up, and I punched in an open broadcast and reported. "Mech Battalion, D, and H companies, 3rd Cavalry Regiment, and two Marine Mobile Infantry platoons, dropping." The first of the brakes was torn away and the second bit in as my com-panel winked out as the ionization from re-entry blanked out my communications. So now the question was whether or not this 'Khan Garth Radick' would honor his promise of safe-landing, but if I saw so much as one missile sent my way I was going to shove 'ROE Zeta' out an airlock.

That said, I hadn't been too trusting. I had exactly 52 drop cocoons with 'mechs in them, counting the two companies from the Brave Rifles 1st and 2nd squadrons, my eighteen, the two Cybers, and the lance of engineers. But I'd had nearly four times that number launched. The cocoons without 'mechs were loaded with even more ECM, as well as thermal sources, and tons of metallic chaff, all to make them appear as more appealing targets than the ones with more valuable cargo. As it descended it would burst and shower the sky with heat sources and clouds of radar-reflective metal. Additionally, the ablative skins of the cocoons were only one-way radar absorbent. They would hide the cocoon it was attached to, but once blasted away it would reflect back the radar signature of a fully-loaded medium battlemech.

They didn't drop alone. Several times during the Hegemony Campaign the Fat Man's forces had made similar promises of safe landing only to attempt to set upon the DropShips as they landed. I didn't know if these 'Clan Wolf' were similar or if they actually meant what they said, but I wasn't going to take the chance. There were only two platoons' worth of pods that had people in them, but there were pods for a full Marine Mobile Infantry battalion (had such a formation existed which really wasn't the case). Partially to keep them guessing and partially to disguise what was in those pods they had a slightly different landing area and were scattered (more or less) over a rather large area. An area that just happened to include a certain rather large, and rather deep, river.

The second skin followed the resistance brakes, and the large ribbon parachute it yanked out as it went gave one hard jerk and disintegrated into a dozen radar-reflective pieces of foil. As it went the coms came back online just in time for someone to scream: "_Fighter Patrol!_"

"Weapons tight!" I snapped back as the second ribbon chute gave me another hard jerk. We were still too high. The cocoons weren't physically that tough, it would have been easy to tear our way out of them. But thanks to the momentum from the engines if we tried to land with just our jets if we didn't shed some velocity first we'd be ground-darts. As much as I hated being vulnerable trying to engage the fighters would be suicide.

Fortunately the fighters didn't engage.

The ribbon chute went its way, taking the second skin with it. The third skin and its chutes lasted a bit longer, and the fourth lasted longer after that. Two thousand meters up, I sent the inner shell on its way and took a look around. The gently rolling hills looked deceptively flat, but the river was right where it was supposed to be and from this altitude I could see the outline of the distant mountains to the west. There were a couple columns of smoke rising like thin strings out that way, casualties of one of Steiner's ambushes or the response of the Woofies I couldn't tell.

I hoped he knew what he was doing. He and Colonel Chaffee hadn't had much time to confer, but I knew the Ol' Man had subordinated himself to the…whoever he was, for the purposes of coordinating their strategy. The problem was that the favored terrain for armor was wide open and flat, and the only way for armor to live in such conditions against battlemechs was to use its mobility and work around the sides rather than face an attack head-on. This was, really, ideal cavalry ground. Wide open spaces, gently rolling hills, hard-packed earth that provided solid footing for 'mechs and tracks alike. But the Cav wasn't an assault regiment, a stand-up knock-out fight was a losing fight for us, and it seemed like the Woofies had the speed to make us decisively engaged if someone put their foot wrong.

At the one-k mark the massive 'chute pack _Bun Bun _carried opened and I was jerked roughly against the restraints as my 'mech was brought up short.

"_Heavy_, on the ground and good to go."

I glanced at a MFD and tapped in a command that brought up a tactical map. H Company, 2nd Squadron, had only three upper-range medium 'mechs, the rest were lightweight meds to heavy-lights. Normally that'd call for my using them as scouting and skirmishing units, but they represented a greater chunk of their parent squadron's 'mech strength than D Company, 1st Squadron. If they got wiped out 2nd would be left with barely twenty percent of its total authorized strength.

_Dragon_ grounded a moment later, and three hundred meters up I let the parachute go its way and used my jump jets to slow my suddenly rapid descent. I felt the feed-back response as foot actuators kissed dirt and flexed my legs, _Bun Bun_'s flexing automatically and in sync with me, and it was suddenly time to get the party started.

"Task Group _Dagger_," I said, and the display configured for communications told me that _Bun Bun_ had decided I was talking to my little band of heroes and was broadcasting accordingly. "Marching Order. _Raven_—" Raven was the Cyberpunks' call sign, "—take point, _Dragon_ left and back. _Heavy,_ mirror _Dragon_ to the right. Move out in sixty seconds."

"_Mustang-_Two—" I continued and once more the display winked at me as _Bun Bun_ shifted to my battalion circuit (admittedly, it was a reinforced company but it was still carried on the charts as a battalion). The company (lance) commanders were getting their people sorted out so I got back to the business of mine, "—Three, One, inverted V formation. Fire Squad, spread-wedge behind us, _Shotguns_ at two and five marks and monitor task group push for calls for fire." Between them the four fire-support 'mechs of the Fire Squad had nearly seventy _tons_ of mixed missile ammunition, which meant I wanted them nowhere near where they'd catch incoming fire if I could at all avoid it. The two _Riflemen_ were even more valuable as they were my only dedicated anti-air assets available. They needed to be as protected as possible, as central as possible to minimize movement time when it became necessary to shift them, and yet close enough to the edges of my formation that they could be effective against incoming ground-attack aircraft.

"_Hardhat_, finger-four formation behind the Fires squad."

I listened with a half-ear as company commanders shook their lances into position and lance commanders organized their units. On the tac-map, icons wandered back and forth across the landing zone as they got into position. Energy weapons were test-fired; those with physical ammo had their actions cycled, and missile launchers were primed. Ancillary systems like ECM, active sensors of various flavors, and targeting lasers, were briefly turned on to make sure they were in working order; jump jets were briefly fired. One by one mechwarriors reported to lance commanders that they were in position and that weapon and equipment checks were completed. Lance commanders reported the same to their company commanders who in turn reported to me and then we were good to go.

I sketched a direction of movement onto the map and squirted it across to company commanders and the Cyber. "Okay, _Raven_," I said on the command push, "Let's move it out."

The lead Cyberpunk clicked his com and the pair took off, and we shook out into position behind them.


	8. Chapter 8

Location: Planting, Federated Commonwealth  
Time: H-Hour Plus 51:32

Star Captain Dale Carns was not at all happy. There were several reasons for this; chief among them was that his cluster had taken so many casualties in the Trials of Refusal against Operation Revival that saKhan Garth Radick had forbidden the 3rd battle cluster from taking part in combat operations even after their losses had been made good. As a result, while the Silver Keshik, and the 352nd and 341st got to crush opponent after opponent, adding victory after victory to their warriors' codices, his trinary was stuck playing nursemaid. Second, he found saKhan Garth Radick's decision to put in the planned base for the follow-on occupation unit while the planet was not yet secured to be…sub-optimal.

Oh yes, there was the time-table to consider and even as effective as it was proving to be Clan Wolf was not uniform in its belief that Khan Ulric Kerensky was not over-extending himself just a little. The planet would be useful, of that there was no doubt. Utilizing the Inner Sphere for the low-tech expendables that any military runs on such as food, clothing, and hydrogen, vastly reduced the strain on their supply lines. But it did not stop him from being uncomfortably aware of how exposed the supply caches were, sitting in uninhabited systems with only their anonymity to protect them and he wondered, briefly, if the Wolf Khan had made the same conclusions from the data that the Wolf Dragoons had brought back.

Clan warfare properly sought to reduce war to a contest between warriors and reduce waste. Over time the guidelines imposed by the Founder had become armor-clad _law_, and resulted in reduced direct attacks upon civilian-castes, industries, and all the other things that people fought over. The battles still happened of course, but they were carefully and safely removed from where innocent bystanders (or useful laborers, depending on the viewpoint of a warrior's clan) and factories were. Over time this safety blanket had extended to all that were not directly involved in combat. Rear areas were seldom attacked, supply depots rarely had guards, and DropShips would often land without fear of being attacked even when SafeCon had not been invoked.

But the information that the Dragoons had brought back clearly indicated that the degenerate spheroids generally avoided targeting factories—more as a result of learning the hard way after spending so many centuries destroying them than as a result of intelligent thought the way the clans had reached a similar decision—and similar facilities. The information also suggested that the spheroids generally tried (though with less success) to avoid fighting in cities and other built-up areas—again, not because of an intellectual decision reached logically and with honor, but because city-fighting was long and bloody and pissed off the people you were either trying to conquer or might have to fight again in the future. The information that the Dragoons had provided, however, clearly showed that _no_ House army avoided engaging any unit except those suited for combat.

In a way he was privately happy that the saKhan had been forced into breaking his bid. Not only did it leave the DropShips and nascent supply depot a badly needed security force (however little he enjoyed being stuck with the job), but it meant that the 3rd Battle Cluster was finally getting its chance. At the same time he was upset. It should not have been necessary for the saKhan to break his bid. Even with this 'Third Cavalry' the defenders were neither so good nor so numerous that the saKhan could not have beaten them if he had not been wiser in his bidding.

No, the fault lay with themselves and their supposed allies in ComStar. The intelligence provided for this operation was good. Too good, it had made them all over-confident and led them to dismiss these newcomers. They had made themselves reliant on it and had failed to properly gain intelligence of their own to provide supporting information as a double-check for accuracy. They had dismissed these newcomers who had deceived the saKhan as to their true order of battle—although, Dale conceded, the saKhan had allowed himself to be deceived and they had merely refrained from correcting his assumptions, a small, but significant, detail—and there was now a whole cluster of 'mechs heading for him along with a star of infantry (though this did not count for a great deal since the spheroids did not possess any battle armor).

All this they had accomplished by simply not landing all of their forces, and Garth's offer of safecon meant that he could not even engage them before they landed. Worse, the enemy commander had called the saKhan shortly before these new 'mechs had entered the atmosphere and 'freely' transmitted his complete order of battle—supposedly to inform Garth Radick of the success the saKhan was having—and it confirmed the unit heading his way as legitimate.

It was…annoying to be part of a force that had broken a bid and watch as the enemy received perfectly allowable reinforcements. The saKhan's newest plan was not merely annoying, it was out-right problematic.

First, things were not as bad as they appeared. Despite being out-numbered four-to-one there seemed to be only two assault-class 'mechs in the enemy formation, and from the way they were positioned in that central grouping they were almost certainly support units and not really suited for direct engagement. The majority of the enemy, in fact, seemed to be in the same light/medium bracket of his own trinary. No doubt his trinary would be hurt, perhaps even seriously, but if their equipment was on level with or even somewhat ahead of what the Clans had encountered so far, they would be dead…if he could engage them.

Given his options he would have held at the outskirts of the space port/supply depot and run a slowly constricting defense, bleeding them until help arrived if needed, but always staying inside them. The saKhan, however, had ordered him to advance and ordered Ancil Radick's Battle Trinary to crush this second wave between them. Two trinaries was more than overkill, it was practically obscene. The real problem, however, was one of coordination, where would they fight and how long would it take for all three forces to get there. If Dale had been the commander of the other side he would have moved as rapidly as possible for the star port, hoping to pin his trinary for as long as possible with part of his force—the heaviest part of his force—while the lighter, faster units burned past for the near-defenseless DropShips.

He paused in his thoughts, though his _Adder_ didn't slow, as he spotted something marring the open plain he was traversing—a dark scorch of burned grasses and debris thrown up by the impact of something heavy. "Bravo-Striker-Deuce."

"Aff," came the almost instant response from MechWarrior Caits.

"Recon analysis of that impact crater," Dale said, training a designator on it for the warrior's attention.

On the tac-map the icon representing Caits' _Mist Lynx_ leapt ahead of the rest of Striker trinary. Privately Dale was somewhat leery of the Warrior's choice of 'mech's, but having a dedicated recon asset at hand was sometimes useful. Times like this. He brought up an image amplifier in time to see the _Mist Lynx_ arrive at the impact point, and as he watched it reach down into the crater and lifted out a hunk of metal.

"Without handing it to a Scientist I can make only a general analysis," Caits said. "It masses approximately one ton, and if one were to add some chaff, it would fill approximately the same volume as the interior of an infantryman drop-pod. A heavy one; perhaps for a jump infantryman with part of a support weapon. The device appears to be a power unit attached to what looks like a burned-out ECM transmitter, perhaps a burst transmitter that is designed to be used once and then cast aside." The distaste in the other man's voice for the waste inherent in such a design was plain.

"Why this for only two platoons of infantry?" Star Commander Lorena of Bravo Striker asked.

"Perhaps they do not trust us to honor SafeCon?" Star Commander Blada Neely of Charlie Striker replied.

"Perhaps," Dale said. "Or perhaps they thought we might not recognize their…reinforcements as a legitimate part of their bid, or it could be simple oversight. This is the way they have trained to do a drop, the way they have always done a drop, and so they did it the same way when they had no need. Is there any danger from this unit, Bravo-Two?"

"Neg, Star Captain," Caits said firmly. "I am picking up more of them, they have a fairly distinct radar signature and the power units retain a residual charge that is likewise identifiable."

"Understood," Dale said. "We are five kilometers from the river. I wish to be across it before the enemy arrives on the far bank."

I scowled at the primary multi-function display that currently showed a line of 'mechs on the far side of the river. I'd hoped that he would attempt to cross it and engage me on my side of the river, but he had held his ground once he realized that was impossible. On a slight up note my battery of _Padilla_ heavy artillery tanks had been waiting for me, though not the slower _Marksmen_.

"Attention, Commander of the forces on the east side of the river, I am Star Captain Dale Carns, Striker Trinary, 3rd Battle Cluster, Beta Galaxy, Clan Wolf."

"Greetings, Star Captain," I said with false cheerfulness. "I am Major Roland Talbot, Attached Battalion, 3d Cavalry Regiment. I…uh, by your ROE we're supposed to issue challenges to individuals?" I asked unnecessarily. "My _Pads_ want in so if you can tell me who you want them to square off against we can get to business."

"Your…Pads?"

"_Padillas_," I said, then added "Arty tracks. They've the range for it so they want to know if they're supposed to designate a target first and let 'em know, or just to pick one and open fire."

Dale ground his teeth. The other man was provoking him with his corruption of English. Worse, he was doing it without even knowing he was. Worst of all…it was working. He might have been able to forgive it, but the man clearly understood what the rules of _Zelbrigen_ were intended for, and his twisting them into an insult by suggesting his artillery engage one-on-one with honorable warriors whose weapons didn't range that far.

"I think not," he said stiffly. "I intend to face you in battle, Major Roland Talbot, not sit on the sidelines of some petty artillery duel. Will you cross the river and engage me in honorable combat?"

"Being on that side of the river gains me nothing," Roland said. "Besides, I'm not sure the _Pads_ are up to the crossing and they don't have ejection systems if something goes wrong, at least not one capable of getting their crews off the bottom of a river like that. Crossing would mean having to leave them and with your buddies closing so fast… Tell you what, let's both go into the river and fight it out underwater. That way I can be back in time to reinforce my arty tracks."

"Such a battleground would make it more difficult to distinguish enemies on sensors," Dale said, bringing up a side display. More than a few of the ECM transmitters had fallen into the river and the scan was littered with radar returns and power sources. "A general melee would certainly favor your numbers, and I doubt you would tell me exactly what the contents of your weapons' magazines are. I certainly would refuse were our positions to be reversed."

"You're not suggesting that I'm trying to lure you into a battlefield of my choosing because I have torps and their launchers instead of missile racks, are you?"

Dale smirked as the other man responded to his insinuation. "Of course not, but a wise Warrior takes sensible precautions against all possibilities, and since you pointed out that the possibility exists…"

"I guess we're at an impasse then," Roland told him. "I won't cross to your side and you won't meet me in the middle…unless you come over to _this_ side of the river?"

"And let you shoot at me from the shore?" Dale asked. "Offer me safe passage and some proof of your good word."

There was a long pause.

"I give you my word, as an officer and a gentleman that none of my 'mechs or combat vehicles, or combat _support_ vehicles, will attack you. Further I'll guarantee no attacks upon you by aerial forces of any kind, including VTOLs and space-based assets, until you stand upon this bank.

"As proof of my good word I will withdraw my 'mech and artillery forces, including my combat vehicles, eighteen hundred meters to the west, on the condition that you, in turn, promise that your friends coming up backside will hold a similar distance from me until my forces have defeated yours, or yours mine."

"Only if you withdraw your combat support vehicles as well," Dale said with a satisfied smirk.

"My _Padillas_ are my only vehicle units," Roland's voice was annoyed over the com. "Given your apparent distain for artillery I don't know if you count them as combat vehicles, the way I do, or if you count them as combat support vehicles. Regardless, I'll withdraw them. In fact, if your friends will guarantee their safe passage I'll send them back to Sondor."

"If they attack anyone before they reached the city they and you will be destroyed without mercy," Dale told him sternly.

"And if they get fired upon before reaching there _we_ will know just how much honor you Woofies really have," was the instantaneous reply.

Dale inhaled sharply. It was not the worst insult he had ever heard directed at his Clan. At the very least it implied that despite the tension between the two different cultures this Roland Talbot did trust in Wolf Honor enough to consider sending a relatively defenseless unit alone almost directly into the path of a full trinary of battlemechs. The name certainly was not as bad as what the Jaguars or Falcons had been known to use on occasion, and some names that members of his clan (and he himself on occasion) had used to deride warriors in other clans. And yet…it stung.

"Very well, you will withdraw your battlemech and combat vehicles one-thousand, eight-hundred meters from the bank of Daltron Meander and my trinary shall cross to you. I will have Trinary Battle halt one-thousand, eight-hundred meters west of your assembly point, and hold there pending the outcome of our battle. Your _Padilla_ tracks, and other combat vehicles, and any Battlemechs you wish to send for that matter, may withdraw to Sondor uncontested. Once there they are free to engage any forces and be engaged by the same," Dale said.

"Is there anything else you wish to add?" Roland asked. "I can compromise further if you wish."

"That is unnecessary," Dale said. "I will see to the other Trinary. Once your people have moved I will make my own movement."

"Understood," Roland said. "See you on the other side."

"—on the other side," I said, keeping the irony out of my voice even after I closed down the com. "Oh no, don't throw me into that briar patch," I added to _Bun Bun_. _Bun Bun _didn't reply, it usually didn't to literary allusions. The reinforced company—trinary—coming up my backside was already slowing down so I hit the task force push.

"_Dagger_ units, _Dagger_ Prime, move to center two-thousand meters west of high-tide mark and reassemble. Standard cigar-shaped loiter point parallel the river. Near side will be no closer than eighteen-hundred fifty meters from high-tide mark. _Padillas_, move south to Sondor and make alternate crossing reassignment. Do not cross before reaching the city. Do not fire upon any enemy unit no matter how close the approach. Exception last, you are fired upon _and struck_ you may return fire as necessary, _and only as necessary_, to break contact. Get moving people."

_Bun Bun_ brought up a rear-view display on a secondary monitor and zoomed in. As I watched the first of the unknown 'mechs stepped into the river.


	9. First Interlude

First Interlude: Establishing Air Superiority the hard way.

Joel Chase, who had once been tagged with the unlikely sobriquet of 'Bunny' and had been forced to endure it ever since, carefully lifted his right hand from the control stick to briefly stretch it before once more replacing it. "Anything yet?"

Sitting in the lower front seat of the AV-13 _Orca_ Vectored Thrust Aerial Craft the gunner/systems operator of _Nomad_-Four, Sergeant Eric 'Lucky' Dyce rolled his eyes as he completed the latest passive sensor sweep. "Nada, Buns," he told his backseater.

"Damn it, this is where Quicksilver said they were."

"Maybe they moved."

"Stunning observation, Lucky," Bunny said. "Maybe I should write a memo to the Colonel." He flexed his hand again, this time without lifting it from the control stick. "This doesn't feel right."

"Maybe I should be the one writing that memo, sir," Lucky retorted. "There is nothing radiating out there. We haven't over-flown anything that the optics has decided was out of place. Maybe there really is nothing out there."

"There doesn't need to be anything out there," Bunny retorted. "For all we know they could be tracking us from orbit with an old-fashioned telescope. No need for revealing radar or other active sensors. They could just be biding their time before pouncing on us like wolves on some unsuspecting deer."

"You have a nasty and suspicious mind, sir," Lucky said.

"And that's enough sirring from you, sergeant," Bunny retorted.

"Of course, Sir Bunny, Duke of Hopsalot, Count of the Cabbage Patch, Baron—"

"_Nomad_-one, _Nomad_-ten, request permission to initiate search pattern gamma."

"Took Dandy long enough," Bunny muttered.

Oscar 'Dandy' Whittingham in _Nomad_-ten was the commander of the five RV-23 _Delphis_ VTACs in 'N' _Nomad_ Troop, 4th Squadron, 3d Cavalry Regiment. His vertols were spread out across the front of _Nomad_ Troop's advance, and mirrored by 'O' _Outlaw_ Troop's _Delphis_es. Bunny, in _Nomad_-four, was on the far left flank of the two air-attack troops, and one of only four vertols armed for an escort mission rather than ground-attack.

"Could be he fell asleep," Lucky said.

Bunny didn't get a chance to reply as Captain Mason 'Jar' Jarowski responded to _Nomad_-ten's request.

"Negative, Dandy, I want you to—"

"Bandits, _Nomad_-Five, five o'clock high, forty kilometers."

"Lucky, reconfigure for air-to-air," Bunny said, twisting in his seat and bringing up a monitor to try and find the approaching fighters as he listened to _Nomad_-one try to sort out the sudden mess.

"Understood. _Nomad_, _Outlaw_, slow circle right to…310 on course for tri-city agri-plex. Standby to break by elements."

"_Nomad_-Three, Four," Bunny said, using an element com-frequency (actually a specific encryption package) that let him and his element leader communicate clearly while still allowing them to listen to the Troop push. "I have lead, Vixen."

"Copy."

Bunny nodded in satisfaction at the agreement. It wasn't an offer made because he sought glory or an early death—although both seemed imminent—and nor was he trying to usurp his wing-leader's authority. It came down to the simple fact that he was armed for aerial attack, and the only other _Orca_ that was so armed were Pacman and Wizard in _Nomad_-eight near the middle of the combined _Nomad/Outlaw_ formation.

Well…him and two _Outlaws_, but they didn't count and were even further out of position to cover him than -eight was.

All of the rest of the _Orca_ gunships had solid shot in their gun magazines and pulse lasers tuned for slower pulse-repetition and heavier power throughput used for ground-attack, rather than the faster-cycling and lighter-hitting settings for an aerial engagement. Their ground-attack ordnance was similarly heavy on bombs and ground-attack rockets than air-to-air missiles. In that situation it made more sense for him to take lead and have _Nomad_-three cover him, where an enemy fighter might hold position as he tried to kill Bunny and give Vixen enough time for her solid-shot and slower-firing lasers to make him pay for it.

"ECM is on standby," Lucky reported. "Chaff and flare dispenser to automatic, track-breakers to automatic. What about the anti-SAM ordnance?"

Bunny hesitated. As part of his escort roles some of the tonnage of ordnance he could carry had been devoted to suppressing and killing enemy air-defenses. Most of it was useless against aerospace fighters. "Jettison the cluster bombs, set rocket-fusing to proximity." Unlike the heavy rockets carried by the ground-strike Orcas, his light-weight rockets were intended to air-burst, the better to have a chance of damaging delicate surface-to-air missiles and their mobile launchers and radar units. "Go active on the ECM as soon as we break. Enemy status?"

"Looks like…twenty birds mixed in two flights. Dissimilar birds, Bunny, I'm looking at six distinct airframes. From the mix of radar and EM profiles I'm guessing they have multiple variants of each."

A graphic out-line of a fighter appeared on a secondary monitor by Bunny's left hand.

"This one has a variant that, from the mag-signature, has a pair of gauss rifles mounted in it. They both hang out with squadron deuce. Both squadrons have a two-bird element with ECM in it."

Both enemy squadrons continued to close and Bunny knew what his troop commander was trying to do, even if he didn't like it. A vertol had a lot of advantages over a helicopter and was far more maneuverable than any aerospace fighter, at least in atmosphere. In a close-range dogfight where maneuverability and fast shooting became more important, they had an edge. If the enemy resorted to high-speed deflection passes they'd be cut to shreds. The woofies were clearly unfamiliar with vertols, and so Jarowski was doing his best to encourage them to get in close. For the same reason he'd chosen to slowly circle towards the agri-plex where the tall buildings could provide terrain for the more agile vertols to work in. Terrain that was otherwise lacking in the low rolling plains they were currently flying over.

"Talk to me about the ECM birds, Lucky."

The graphic changed. "Awful lot crammed into the nose, looks like this is an autocannon," one of the four muzzles emerging from the nose of the aerospace fighter flashed. "Five or ten-rating, probably, and this looks an awful lot like the muzzle for a PPC though the cowling is weird, it looks like an ER-profile but this bulge shouldn't be there. This," a third muzzle flashed, along with a pair in each wing.

"Medium pulse lasers," Bunny said. "No way to tell how they're configured?"

"Nope, no way to even tell if they're pulses though I admit they make more sense on an aerospace fighter than standard models do. But if those are mediums, and I agree, then these suckers are larges," the second muzzle located in each wing root, "and the shrimpy-looking one in the nose is a small. I've got something else built into the leading edge of the wings, could be a brace of cannons, or short-ranged missile launchers."

"Call them launchers," Bunny decided. "Tail guns?"

"Got a couple of bulges in the after wing root, but it's a bad angle. They're probably the housing for the emitter matrix of the ECM gear. At least that's how _I_'d set it up, but—"

"Nobody asked you," Bunny finished. "What about the rest?"

"No external ordnance, though I suppose they could use an internal bay. None of them are stealth jobs though so I can't see a reason they should do things that way."

"So standard munitions."

"Unless they have something really exotic for their autocannons or missiles," Lucky cautioned. "Energy weapon-heavy for the most part. There are some with a heavy autocannon or missile battery in the nose, but I'm not seeing mirrored wing-mounts for anything other than lasers, particle guns, and short-ranged missiles. What do you want to bet that they have problems with heat burden, Bunny?"

It made sense, given that engagement times by a fighter against a stationary ground target were short, and those against another fighter even shorter still. The air-defense _Rifleman_ battlemech had the same problem for the same reason. But Bunny couldn't see any good way of taking advantage of the possible weakness other than getting shot at.

"No bet," Bunny said. "Any ideas on how we can use it?"

"If only we had some masers…"

Bunny agreed with him. Unfortunately they _didn't_ have any of the experimental energy weapons that could cause heat to rapidly rise in targeted vehicles. "Any other ideas?"

"Get them to shoot at someone else so that they can't when they lock on us?"

"I'm sure everyone else would be very interested in hearing that idea, Lucky."

"Ha, ha, Bunny.

"Ident enemy ECM carrier, designate bandits one and two," Bunny said. The woofie fighters were getting awfully close now and it was time to concentrate on business.

The smile on Lucky's face vanished as he bent over his controls. "Identified," he reported. "Designated bandits one and two."

"Ident, missile-boat and dash-20 gun, same airframe," Bunny continued, scrolling down the estimated list. "Designate bandits three and four."

"Identified. Designated bandits three and four."

"Ident, quad identical airframes. Designate bandits five through eight."

"Identified. Designated five through eight. Designating remaining targets, squadron one, bandits nine and ten. Want to designate squadron two, Bunny?"

"Air-Cav, _Nomad_-one. Standby."

"No," Bunny told his gunner in a taught voice. He gave the woofies a ten percent increase in range and mentally calculated the time it would take them to intercept, added the time it'd take him to do a wing-over, and then added another twelve seconds at the woofies' present speed and his max without the afterburner. "Vix," he said with forced calm, "on my mark…_now!_"

"…_break!_"

The two orders came at nearly the same time, but Bunny had already tilted the stick to the left and at the same time he twisted it and _slid_ it in the same direction as his left hand worked the throttles. His right foot pushed, toe downs, while he shoved with his left heel, toes back. The flight control computer interpreted all of this and pitched him to the left as his VTAC literally stopped in mid air, pivoted on the rear corner of the left wing, and then slammed him back into the seat as he accelerated at full power on a course that was 180º to his previous heading.

"Acquire one." The words were out before he had completed the turn.

"Acquiring…_locked_," Lucky snapped as the nose ended in a cone-shaped area of space centered on bandit-one that the missiles needed to be launched within if they were going to have a hope of hitting their target. The aft end of the vertol sank with the sudden loss of air-speed.

"_Nomad_-four, fox-three, fox-three," Bunny reported. A single squeeze of his finger sent two missiles dropping free as their engines ignited and accelerated them toward the enemy fighters as his left hand worked thrust-vector controls. A thumb-flick as they closed and then: "Guns, guns, guns," as they accelerated into the heart of the enemy squadron.

Star Captain Sumner Johns flexed his paw on the stick of his _Jagatai_ aerospace fighter. It wasn't really a paw, of course. When he had lost his right arm in his Trial of Position after the final bondcord had been cut he had had the limb replaced by a prosthetic that had been custom-crafted to resemble a wolf's fore-leg. But in order to properly control his fighter it was necessary that his new limb retain dexterous fingers rather than the proper paw like he had wanted. Still, a paw was what he had wanted, and it was how he continued to think about the hand-analog.

It had been a frustrating war. In fact, it had been a frustrating few years. He did not resent the time spent as bondsman, especially since it now placed him in one of the invading clans sent to purge the Inner Sphere of their decadent corruption, greed, and wastefulness. There was a certain amount of…regret—the world failed to convey the proper emotion but it was the best had come up with—at the amount of time it had taken, but regret was very different from resentment. Nor did he resent the time spent learning to use his paw and proving that he had mastered the prosthetic well enough to still be a warrior—even with Clan medical technology it was not something that all who had shared a similar experience was able to achieve.

He did not resent the time and effort it had taken to scout out the new warriors he had brought into his fighter binary, or to swap out those pilots he could best do without and find those who had the skills and expertise he wanted. In spite of the time it had taken, he was proud of having built and trained what was widely regarded as one of the best fighter trinaries in the clans—not a small feat considering the Cloud Cobras' and Snow Raven's decided preference for aerospace fighters.

What he did resent, and deeply so, was that because of their elite status his binary was often among the first bid away, and saKhan Garth Radick's order barring the 3rd Battle Cluster from combat in the Inner Sphere. Better to have been left behind in the Kerensky Cluster where at least there was a chance of fighting against another clan trying to take advantage of the Khans' absence and that of five front-line galaxies, or the chance to do some counter-raiding of his own. Sitting and watching from orbit as the 341st and 352nd Assault Clusters won victory after victory, their Aerospace Pilots, MechWarriors, and Elementals coming back with victories added to their codexes and battle honors added to their clusters' standards, was well nigh unbearable.

He owed these new-comers a debt. Forcing the saKhan to break his bid so utterly was no small feat, but better yet, it gave one Star Captain Sumner Johns the chance to prove his quality.

Not that his gratitude was going to save them, of course.

A system check came back all green. His LRM rack was loaded, the lasers were charged, and the wing-mounted ERPPCs were warmed up. With almost two minutes remaining before he reached effective range at the leisurely pursuit velocity he had chosen, he glanced at the long-range camera that was slaved to one of the larger of the two enemy fighter classes.

It was an odd sort of design. A blunt egg-shaped nose area was oddly tilted so that the narrow end was set forward and below the main fuselage which tapered from where it joined the upper rear end of the cockpit all the way back to a point. Two pylons mounted an X-form tail assembly with the arms racked curiously up and forward (or down and forward in the case of the lower set). Two nacelles mounted forward of the tail had to be engines, as were the matching pair under the down- and forward-swept wings mounted a third of the way back from the nose. Inverted gull-wing canards mounted on either side of the cockpit-pod, just back from the nose, seemed more for mounting external ordnance than any benefits to the flight profile it may have imparted.

It was an impressive design combining incredible maneuverability from the fundamentally aerodynamically-unstable wings with impressive computer support to keep it in the air. Both features, of course, assumed, that the computer support was capable of wringing every advantage inherent in the airframe and not merely sufficient to keep it aloft. A somewhat safe assumption though. Given the general technological decline of the Inner Sphere since the days of the Star League it would have been next to impossible for any of the House Lordlings to develop and deploy such a design. But clearly there was at least one more player, one that had managed to keep warships in service as more than just a hulk. For someone with access to such technology it might very well have been possible.

Even as he thought this, one of the curious aircraft on the far left of the formation pitched up on its tail and as though it were the focal center of a circle, the rest of the fighter spun around it. It was one of the many familiar ways an aircraft that _required_ a computer to maintain constant control its flight surfaces could die if that flight control was lost.

Only it stopped spinning.

In less time than it took to blink twice the aircraft had complete reversed its course and pitched up to charge at Sumner Johns' awaiting fighter binary.

"Deuce Star, anchor here plus five," Johns said.

His radar warning receiver blared an alert. His head jerked up, summoned by the alarm, as his left hand instinctively shoved the throttle forward until it hit the check-stops before the afterburner. The range was still long, but a sparkle of light on metal and the VR graphic splashed across his HUD indicated a solitary missile rising towards his star.

He dropped a targeting reticule on it, the missile was too fast for PPCs or missiles, but his pulse lasers worked just fine. Large missiles like this had been abandoned centuries before when laser systems finally became efficient enough to bring to the battlefield and Sumner Johns was perfectly content to remind these Spheroids of that little fact.

His lasers refused to lock on.

The velocity of the missile was not enough to spoof the _Jagatai_'s target acquisition and tracking computer, closing velocities in space battles could be much higher. Nor was size the problem, the missile was too big to escape being effectively tracked like standard missiles were and yet too small to have any armor worth mentioning.

It had to be some kind of stealth construction, he decided as he flipped up on his aerospace fighter's right wing and pulled into a dive towards the enemy formation. An extravagant expense for a one-use weapon, especially one so dated. And yet that same stealth coating granted it a fairly good chance of surviving to attack range, and with a missile that size, attack range might be all that was necessary.

The missile streaked past him, angling for the back side of his standard pentagonal formation, either the _Scytha_s of point four, or the _Jengiz_ of point five.

"First Star, break by points and engage at will," Sumner Johns ordered, sparing a glance to make sure that his wingman, Tamm, was still with him as he stooped upon one of the smaller craft.

The craft stopped in mid-air and spun. The fleet-little fighter must use some kind of vectored-thrust array, Johns thought approvingly as it side-slipped out of the path of his missiles. A tap of his left peddle swung his _Jagatai_'s nose slightly as the dewclaw on his paw toggled weapon controls. The targeting reticule flashed green and twin azure bolts momentarily connected the two craft, and then he was past and pulling up into a climbing loop.

On a monitor the small craft sagged as its back broke, then fire flared in the cockpit as the canopy came off a moment before twin chairs rocketed from the crippled fighter.

Johns tossed in a little right stick to throw a victory roll, but at the same time he frowned. So, he thought as on the monitor tracers from the downed craft's partner sparkled after his wingman, the smaller ones are two-seat craft. By and large the Clans did not use such craft, only a few kept them for advanced aerospace fighter training. Even among the Inner Sphere, very few aerospace fighters had two-person crews. That these ones did said something about their intended purpose and the philosophy of their builders, but he was not quite sure what that something was.

"_Yeee-haw!_" Bunny bellowed as the two formations interpenetrated. Electric blue lightning cut through the air as he pulled out of a barrel roll and cut into a vertical climb before abruptly shifted the vectored thrust controls to 'down' as a swarm of missiles past overhead. The move threw his AV-13 _Orca_ onto its back and he flipped the thrust back to normal and did a half-loop which put him back into proper perspective.

"What the hell, Bunny?" Vixen snarled at him as her gunship flew past. "I'm the leader!"

"Copy."

A moment later his VTAC shuddered and he looked wildly at the damage display only to find that everything was green. His stores display was a different story, and as he watched, icons began dropping away. Bunny took a breath as he realized what Lucky had done. Per his order, Lucky had jettisoned the cluster bombs before the battle was joined, which had lightened the airframe by a not small amount, which would in turn improve speed and maneuverability and also somewhat lessen the chance of taking a lot of unfortunate damage if the exposed ordnance was hit. Also like he had ordered Lucky had retained the short-range rocket pods.

But Bunny had forgotten to give his gunner any orders about the hyper-speed anti-radiation missiles that were used to attack enemy ground-to-air radar. Lucky, on his own initiative, had decided to dump the missiles.

Bunny started to say 'good job', but then the entire cockpit canopy darkened as the plasma exhaust from a quartet of missiles boiled the air in front of us. "Jesus, what the—"

"SEAD, Boss," Lucky said.

Bunny blinked and it took him a moment to realize that Lucky was talking about Suppression of Enemy Air Defense, one of the critical aspects of their escort mission. The ground-attack aspect. "What did you do?" he demanded.

"I reconfigured to home on jamming," Lucky explained.

"I didn't think they could work that way against aerial targets," Bunny commented as he threw the _Orca_ into a sideways S-skid and snapped a couple of rounds off at a fighter that was getting a little too friendly with Vixen's rear end. "Find me bandit one or two."

"They don't know that, and it was that or drop 'em," Lucky retorted. "I thought I might try getting some use out of them. Got him."

An icon flashed in his heads-up display, and Bunny sent his Orca into a flat turn, cutting the corner on Four. "Vix, I have the lead. Two-points pivot, fighter passing north to south."

"Three," Vixen responded as she slammed the controls to bring her craft into a hover that skidded past his _Orca_ even as he pivoted the nose towards the north.

"I've got it," Lucky reported. "Almost there…locked!"

The enemy fighter had banked into a turn that left its exposed dorsal surface exposed and coherent beams of light lanced out at it, soon joined by more beams from Nomad-Three.

"Four, _drop_."

Bunny didn't have time to identify it, just grabbed the throttle quadrant and yanked back. The _Orca_ dropped like a rock, the unstable wing geometry threatening to spill them into an unrecoverable tumble. He hit the bypass control on the Vectored Thrust Aerial Craft's hybrid engine, venting plasma directly from the fusion core into the thrusters to pitch the _Orca_ into a nose-first dive.

"Two bandits down, ECM is clear," Lucky reported from the front seat.

"Two?" Bunny asked. With air moving over the wings again Bunny reverted to the hybrid drive system and swung the nose right as he pitched back up. "Three, break right on my mark," he ordered, lining up on a heavy fighter making a run on Vixen.

"HARM," Lucky explained, then added: "Locked."

"Break!"

"Fox two, fox two," Lucky called out, launching on his own initiative as Vixen rolled her _Orca_ onto its right side and dropped like a rock.

Twin missiles flashed past the other vertol in pursuit of the woofie fighter, and Vixen waited until they were past before dropping the tail until she was falling tail-first then, like Bunny, cut in the hybrid thrusters and rose on a vertical plume of plasma. The exhaust from the fusion core splashed across the path of the first fighter's wingman, and its flight straightened slightly as the pilot was forced to rely on instruments, half of which had sensors burned away and his canopy opaqued as it absorbed the plasma energy.

Bunny didn't need Lucky's help to lock his lasers onto the temporarily vulnerable aerospace fighter. It shook, armor splintering and one of the vertical stabilizers sheering off entirely before the craft was able to pull out of effective range. "Which ones were those?"

"Uh…five and six."

"Damn," Bunny said. He'd designated the targets in order for a reason. "Status bandit one and two."

"One's dead, my HARMs, you're welcome. Two is bugging out. You want a vector for a kill?"

"No. Find me bandit three." The heavy gun carried by bandit-three, and the extensive missile array carried by bandit-four, would be absolutely murder to the vertols in close. Bunny had toyed briefly with targeting them first, but decided that the other VTACs needed every scrap of targeting ability they could get, which had necessitated bandits one and two dying first.

"Found him, Bunny. He's on ou—"

His radar warning receiver screamed and Bunny did something that in the future he would never be able to replicate in the simulators. As later analysis would show he started into a tight right turn, the automatic chaff and flare dispenser kicking out decoys behind him in a wide arc as the turn shifted into a pivot that kicked his tail out past where his cockpit had been. This maneuver in and of itself was neither impossible nor instantly fatal. But at this point Bunny, instead of rolling towards his right wing to level out, rolled left and kicked in rudder as he shifted the thrusters to hove.

He ended in a flat, inverted spin being propelled to the ground.

The enemy fighter must have been as surprised at the maneuver as Bunny was because he didn't fire, but Lucky, shrieking at his insane pilot from the forward seat where he could do nothing to save his own life, activated the rocket pods. As direct-fire weapons they were short-ranged, better suited to a kind of indirect aerial artillery and meant to use altitude to stretch their range beyond effective return fire. But the range _was_ short, and Lucky had both pods in sequence-fire, and the turn was regular enough and fast enough that he had three full firing passes before the enemy fighter was out of range.

Somehow—this was the part Bunny was never able to replicate, though he later managed the first part in simulators—he flipped the _Orca_ back onto its belly. Lucky and Vixen were both screaming at him, and the furball was well above them. Far fewer _Orca_ and _Delphis_ VTACs were flying than had been a minute before.

"Status?"

"Engines green," Lucky said, dropping the rocket pods with their few remaining rockets armed in their tubes. It'd make a mess of someone's fields but it would deny the woofies some intelligence anyway. "Two heat, two radar remaining. Lasers green. Cannon down to half. Fuel is yellow. Airframe is hell-if-I-know."

"_Nomad_-one," Bunny called as Vixen in _Nomad_-three stopped screaming at him to take a breath.

"One's dead. So is ten," Lucky said. "_Outlaw_ command elements are off the air."

"Fuck." Bunny said distinctly. If they had broken and run for it at the beginning the fighters would have slaughtered them. As it was that was still happening, but the battle had drifted closer to the massive agri-plex. "_Nomad_. _Outlaw_. Get low and get fast. Take cover in the agri-plex."

"You don't have the authority for that."

"Everyone else who had it is dead," Bunny retorted.

Sumner Johns pulled his _Jagatai_ into a long inside loop that took him up over the fight so that he could take stock of the situation. They were winning handedly; he had four victories to his credit just by himself. But despite that he was disappointed. The enemy's craft were clearly his unequal in speed or armor, but their drive system—of which he only hoped enough would be recovered from scrap for the Scientist-caste to reverse-engineer—granted them a degree of maneuverability that only the lightest and most maneuverable of omni-fighters, piloted by the very best of truebirth pilot-stock, could hope to achieve in the atmosphere.

On second thought, no, not even a light aerospace fighter could have done the…the only way Johns could think of to describe the maneuver was a back-flip, which was plainly ridiculous.

Most of the enemy, unfortunately, was armed for ground-attack and their reliance on external ordnance left them pitifully armed compared to even the lightest armed omnifighter in his alpha star. Only four of the larger fighters seemed to carry any air-to-air ordnance of note, though the rest had fought no less valiantly for having weapons better suited to ground targets. One of the air-superiority fighters had suffered the misfortune of picking Bew's third point as its first target, and Orstur in alpha-four-two had ripped apart another with his _Scytha_'s ultra-20 autocannon almost before it had had a chance to respond to their attack.

Johns himself had killed the third, although not before it had inflicted severe damage upon his wingman and both _Visigoth_s in second point. He had lost three aerofighters destroyed, including Ostur who had been ripped apart by another of the fighters in retaliation, and two more were limping back to the starport with extensive damage to flight surfaces and in one case, engine core. If it had been anything other than a _Jenghiz_—except maybe for one of the notoriously rugged _Kirghiz_—and the pilot any less than one of Sumner Johns' hand-picked and trained, the aerospace fighter would have certainly crashed.

He pitched over the top of the loop and throttled up as he headed for the ground. A gasp, and then a muttered oath was filtered through his helmet's audio system, and he glanced at a monitor to find that the armored dorsal surface of the right wing of his wingman's _Jagatai_ was peeling up and ripping off.

"I can no longer stay with you, Star Captain," Tamm Ch'in, the only other bloodnamed warrior in alpha star, reported formally.

"Can you return it to base?"

"Perhaps…neg. I don't think so." The response was flat with stress.

"Punch out," Johns ordered, forgiving the other warrior his momentary lapse by not drawing attention to it. Nor would he later, when they had all returned to the ground for the mission debriefing.

"Aff," Tamm agreed. The canopy of the crashing omnifighter was jettisoned a moment before the cockpit burst into flames as the powerful rocket under the command coach punched the warrior free of the stricken craft.

Johns tightened his dive, selected another target for himself, and rolled to turn the positive-G dive into a negative-G dive.

Below him, enemy fighters broke off attack runs. Even those trying to evade from his remaining pilots sought to break away from the battle, and were covered by a pair of fighters flying backwards. He adjusted his dive to line up on the remaining air-to-air fighter craft, but there was a flicker of motion out of the corner of his eye where none should be.

Sumner John glanced right, then pulled back on his flight control stick as at the same time he snatched back the throttle quadrant so hard he almost pulled it past the engine cut-off stops. A second sweep of his hand deployed flaps, air-breaks, dropped his landing gear, everything he could do to slow his craft as quickly as possible while also performing the hardest break his fighter was capable of while maintaining flight characteristics.

For a moment he didn't think he was going to manage to avoid the _Jagatai_ that was furiously pursuing one of the escaping enemy craft. But then the omnifighter was past with nothing more than a moderately hard thump from impacting the ion-wash from the plasma engines. His computer warned of armor damage to his underside, a loss of ventral and lateral sensor arrays, and possible damage to his left main gear.

Alizon, Johns decided after examining his tactical display to identify the pilot as Alpha-three-two, was in for a very serious discussion concerning who has the right of way. Still, she had been pursuing an enemy and _had_ managed to avoid killing both of them, so perhaps only a moderate tone was in order.

With a short snarl he ran a quick check on the rest of his _Jagatai_ and then shoved his throttles forward again. There were still enemies to kill, and if they wanted to flee he would let them run.

And the Wolves would chase them down and devour them.

"Come on, Vixen, it's time to go," Bunny said, slid-slipping and peppering a fighter with the laser he'd slaved to his controls. Lucky retained the other weapons, although the autocannon down to the dregs of its magazine well.

"You think I don't know that?" the other pilot spat. "Go. I'll cover you."

"Cover me with what?" Bunny asked. "Move it."

"I have seniority here!"

"Then move it, _ma'am_!" Bunny said sarcastically as Lucky worked his gunnery controls and tried to get a lock with the under-powered defensive lasers in the roots of the tail struts. He could feel his Orca shudder again as someone got in a clean hit, and once more kicked on the burners, shunting more engine plasma directly into the thrusters.

"Gotta go faster, Vix."

"I _am_," came the strained retort, but Bunny knew it wasn't going to be enough.

"Over the shoulder," he told Lucky.

"Excuse me?"

"We have four missiles left. I want them all gone. Over the shoulder launches."

"The heaters aren't designed for that flight profile," Lucky objected. "There's no telling whether or not they'll be able to lock on by themselves and run an intercept before the woofies blow right past them."

"Shit, use the radar birds only then."

"Tracking…tracking…_locked-on, _fox three, fox three!" Lucky said, the last six words coming so fast that they were almost one.

Bunny didn't have time to see where the missiles went or what damage they inflicted. They were passing through the boundary area between the residential tracts and the massive inner complex of granaries and slaughter houses, cooking plants and freezing plants, packaging facilities and loading/shipping docks, and all the other bits and pieces of agri-factories that were needed to ship a planet's-worth of food out of its solar system.

"I can't shake them, Four."

"Yes you can, just like I showed you," Bunny snapped back. He dodged past a building that had to be fifty meters high, and briefly toyed with the idea of dropping another two meters or so but decided it wasn't worth the risk of playing tag with what his instruments said—if they were to be believed—were high-voltage power lines. Why anyone would use such an antiquated and dangerous method of power transmission he couldn't begin to fathom.

"_Pegasus_-two, all units. Mission Complete. Repeat. Mission Com—"

The channel went silent with a grim finality, but Bunny found a little satisfaction in knowing that P Troop had accomplished their mission at least.

"Have you identified the one taking pot-shots at Four?" Bunny asked his gunner.

"Boss?"

"Have you?" Bunny snapped.

"Yeah, why?"

"Lock them up and hold onto something," Bunny said.

"Oh shiiiiiiiaaaaah."

Bunny made another pivot turn, but this time instead of shedding velocity he snapped the thrusters into reverse which left him flying backwards down a relatively narrow lane of increasingly large buildings. "Fox two, fox two," he noted coldly as the two all-aspect heat-seeking missiles dropped free, and a donation of lasers and the last of his autocannon ammunition flashed out at the fighter.

The fighter hesitated in air, clearly unnerved by his strange flight profile. He started to break off, not at all interested in finding out what the clearly insane pilot was going to do next. But lasers were _light speed_ weapons, and at the range they were at, the cannon was effectively the same. Both arrived before the pilot could break off and chipped away at what armor was left on the forward fuselage and wings. Despite the closing speed between the two, the same couldn't be said for the missiles which didn't arrive until _after_ the pilot had started to break off.

The first found a weak spot in the armor. It blasted away what was left and ripped a hole in the underside that would spell doom if the pilot tried to survive an atmosphere reentry, but otherwise didn't manage to accomplish much.

The second missile nearly missed, having locked onto the plasma exhaust rather than the fighter itself. It detonated in proximity mode, and by that time the fighter and nearly passed out of the danger zone. What few pieces of shrapnel hit the aerospace fighter had used up most of their momentum and were safely deflected. All, that is, but one.

A solitary metal fragment, not much larger than the palm of a person's hand, found the hole torn in the underside of the fighter. It rattled around, bouncing off structural members, the housing of a weapon pod, part of the avionics. With its last bit of momentum it came to rest near one of the auxiliary feeds for the fusion plant just as the pilot throttled up into the accelerating climb that was his best option for clearing the street quickly. With its last amount of momentum and edge of the metal caught the feed-line.

It wasn't a big tear, little more than a pin-prick really, and the auxiliary feed was normally pressurized with argon. A detected leak would lock down the feed permanently. If the same happened while the feed was pressurized with hydrogen the flight computer would still have locked it down, and increased the flow down the other feed (there were always at least two in operation to provide redundancy for just such a situation) until another auxiliary took over, or the pilot was forced to disengage.

But the leak was so small and came even while the throttle was advanced—which dumped more fuel into the engine—and enough battle damage had already been taken, that the computer decided that the slight loss in thrust was due to damage in the thruster-assemblies of which there was already a good deal. Since in atmosphere the throttle was tied to airspeed rather than acceleration, the computer simply dumped in a little more fuel to make up the difference and flashed a message to its pilot that it had taken more engine damage, probably to the thruster-assembly. In any case the fusion plant's temperature and pressure remained nominal which allayed fears of an engine breach.

But in the center of the fighter, hydrogen seeped out. As long as the fighter was inverted it escaped harmlessly into the atmosphere, but when the pilot leveled out it began to collect across the top of the fighter's internal spaces.

In the end it the aerospace fighter's death came from an arcing spark that originated in the system of lights that were used by warship landing crews to judge closing velocities.

"—that they can fly _backwards!_"

Sumner Johns grinned at the consternation at the other pilot's voice. He had tried to hard to challenge them, something had started to become challenging in the last few months, that he had missed being challenged and surprised himself. Enemy fighters that could fly backwards were certainly both.

The Clans had few vessels capable of such feats in the atmosphere, and what few they did were experimental craft used to explore the physics of very high angles of attack, and their effect upon computers, weapons, and man. Many considered craft capable of such things little more than stunts. Fun to fly, perhaps, but not really war-machines.

Trust the Inner Sphere to not know something and make a weapon out of it.

He laughed.

"_Wolfman_," Alizon continued, her tone still professionally outraged, but also excited in the way only a pilot presented with a new fighter capable of untold wonders of speed and ability could manage. "Do you know where w—"

The channel went abruptly dead as overhead as Alizon's seventy-tone _Jagatai_ blew apart.

John's pulled back slightly on the throttle, allowing the enemy to once more open the range as his head turned to watch scraps of aerospace fighter glinting in the sunlight as they headed for the ground.

"Beta Star closing on your order."

Sumner Johns blinked, shook his head, and once more focused on the fleeing enemy fighters. He couldn't remember calling in his second star.

"Oh, _shit_," Bunny said.

"Stunning observation, sir, mind if we get out of here?" Lucky asked.

For once Bunny didn't respond to the use of his rank inside the vertol, something he was usually quick to warn his gunner against.

"Yeah, I think I'm with you on this one," he said, putting the _Orca_ into a more sedate spin, what with the open range, than his last one had been. A glance at the radar plot told him that whoever was on the other side was bringing in the second squadron that had been happy to loiter up above and observe. It also told him something else.

"Vix, why the fuck are you slowing down?"

"Language, Four."

"Sentiment remains, Three," Bunny shot back.

"I decided to wait for you."

"Yeah? Well next time, _don't!_"

"You see those grain silos up ahead?"

Bunny scowled and the distinctly narrow path ahead of him. They had left the residential areas well behind and were now passing up a major thoroughfare with massive agri-factories on either side. "You mean the double-row of two-hundred meter tall cylinders up ahead? Yeah, I see them."

"When we get to them, break left."

Like _that_ was going to go over well, Bunny thought, but before he could reply a new voice spoke on the com.

"_Outlaw_, _Thunder God_, maintain present speed and heading."

"Thunder God?" Bunny asked out-loud. Then, "oh." Pause. "_Oooh_." He grinned.

"Copy that, _Thunder God_," Vixen replied.

"Thunder God, Bunny?" Lucky asked.

"Zeus," Bunny said. "Zeus was the god of thunder." He could see the helmeted head of his gunner slowly nod in understanding.

_Thunder God_ was the official callsign of the 3d's air defense company, which was equipped with ZSU-77-2 _Zeus_ Self-Propelled Artillery, Air Defense. The tracks were, like many of the Cav's equipment, technically on the Terran Hegemony experimental weapons list, but after nearly fourteen years of war all the gear still in used had more than proved itself. In that same decade and a half the _Zeus_ tracks had proved themselves so well that even many in the Brave Rifles—who really should have known better—knew the air defense company better by the name _Zeus_ than they did by the unit's official callsign.

"Lucky," Bunny said quickly. "Send them everything we have on those fighters. Do it quickly."

On the street ahead and below turrets indexed. Leopards—Laser Point Defense System—were activated and missile-defense was set to 'auto'. Datalinks were established, making sure that the soon-to-appear shot pattern was consistent to avoid 'clumping' in some areas while others were left untouched. Radar and ECM emitters were warmed and readied. Electrically-driven barrels were rotated up to speed. Targeting computers were brought up and cross-linked. Lieutenant Hilda Makepeace reflected on the irony of her name and chosen profession, as she did every time before a fight.

"Download from _Nomad_-four. It's sensor profiles of enemy fighters!"

"Analysis!" Makepeace snapped.

There wasn't time for a full and complete analysis. Those units suspected to have ECM and gauss cannons were given higher priority—one because of their effects on the datalink and effectiveness of targeting system, the other because of the range and power they had—missile units were given a lower priority, trusting to the LPDSes and ECM to blunt the worst of it. There wasn't time to sort out which of the others had the heaviest autocannon or energy-weapon armament.

"Reprioritizing fire-mission…go!"

"Set system to automatic," Makepeace said. "Transmitters to automatic."

"All systems go."

"Consent lights on, engagement on automatic. Targeting computer has control."

Makepeace nodded once.

"Engage!"

Sumner Johns grinned, then frowned, as a flurry of challenges came so fast that the overlapped and made themselves almost indecipherable. None of them were really proper in the Clan sense with a rank and name and unit and position in that unit and what fighter type or mech was being used, followed by a challenge, usually with some sort of insult, addressed to another specific war-machine. Instead it was little more than a unit call-sign _Thunder God_-Three-One through Three-Four, followed by a reference to a position that they were attacking.

The grin came at the idea of more enemy fighters to face. The frown from the way the message was addressed and the fact that he was pretty sure that the fighters he had engaged used only one position number, not two. A moment of thought was enough for him to realize that they were designating fighters in beta star. They were had refrained from using the aerospace fighter's proper names, of course, since there was no way they could have known them. In their absence they had simply counted them from south to north and leading fighter to trailing.

There was something else, though. Something about how the fighters were positioned…

His blood went cold.

The _ZSU_-77-2 took its three-letter designator from an ancient weapon system designed for much the same purpose. That acronym was lost in history, but the casual name assigned to it by the pilots who might have to face it had survived the millennium since its introduction more or less intact.

The version used by the Brave Rifles, in addition to its ECM gear and LPDS, had, in a turret, two six-barreled rotary autocannons. While these cannons could not use the semi-combustible case munitions that nearly every other unit vertol, armor, and mech alike, used, it carried over ten tons of ammunition for them. Specially formulated ammunition. Ammunition that fired like standard, but via a combination time/proximity fuse, would burst into a cloud of shrapnel in mid-air.

Sumner Johns had caught on, but a moment too late. A wall of steel splinters appeared in the air ahead of four fighters, spread out enough so that no matter how their pilots maneuvered they couldn't avoid getting hit. Those same patterns conveniently over-lapped in the relatively narrow confines, and those four fighters were not the only ones sharing the airspace.

The range was forced to close still further, and then the _Zeus_es revealed their second deadly surprise.

It was called Scorpion, more for a convenient handle than an alphanumeric designation and not any particular allusions from its flight profile. Scorpion was a moderate-ranged surface-to-air missile with a multi-mode seeker, a SRM-standard warhead, and could be fitted in three, six, and eight-packs. Each _Zeus_ had two six-pack launchers, and carried three tons of ammunition—thirty rounds—exclusive of those that were pre-loaded in the launchers.

"Blow through!" Johns ordered. "Engaged units go vertical."

It was not a particularly _good_ move, but it would give separation between the two and that would allow him to get his remaining pilots clear. Get them clear so that they could plot how to remove this unpleasant surprise….

January, 3050

The view, Sumner Johns decided, was pleasant enough. It failed to live up to the stories and the images in the holo-dramas that were enjoyed by the laborer caste, but after so long spent in space it felt good to stand via real gravity again.

"Enjoying the view, Star Captain?"

Johns turned to find Ulric Kerensky standing behind him. "It is pleasant enough, Khan," he replied. He was not at all sure how he felt about the other warrior, and it bothered him.

On one hand Ulric was widely regarded as the leader of the so-called 'warden' movement, an ideological mindset that one Sumner Johns found mealy-mouthed at best, and rank cowardice at worst. But Ulric nobody could find Ulric mealy-mouthed and even fewer could doubt the Khan's courage and skill.

On the other, Ulric Kerensky had devised a plan that, warden or no, would put Clan Wolf far in advance of any other in the invasion. It was an audacious plan. A cunning plan. Cunning like a wolf. A plan that required the close cooperation and coordination of not just warriors, but also merchants to run JumpShips behind enemy lines, and technicians and laborers to emplace the requisite supply caches without any warriors for protection if they were discovered.

It was the kind of plan that Clan Blood Spirit, his former Clan, _should_ have come up with. Blood Spirit, _esprit de corps_, all the parts working together sharing the same risks and the same glories. It was the kind of plan they should have been able to come up with, been able to execute even better than the wolves. But he knew it was the _last_ plan they would have come up with had Clan Wolf's and Clan Blood Spirit's positions been reversed, and it was a bitter gall to see everything they could have been but were not.

Deciding that he had to say something and that it really was not proper for a warrior who was _abtahka_ to be thinking about his former clan in such a way, he shifted slightly. "Is there anything I can do for you, my Khan?"

"What do you think?" Ulric asked him, gesturing towards the window.

There were so many ways to answer that question. "I think the saKhan would have been…wiser—" one had to be polite after all "—to have left us, that is to say the 3rd Battle Cluster—back in the Kerensky Cluster and swap it for another cluster he felt would be useful in battle."

"So that you could hunt bandits and raiders, Star Captain?" Ulric asked wryly.

Sumner frowned, "hunting bandits is no great honor, Khan. But it is _some_ honor."

Ulric gave him an unreadable expression. "Grant me three years, Star Captain, grant me three mayhap four on the outside, and I will _guarantee_ that you will have had more than enough honor to satisfy you…if you are still alive to be satisfied."

"As you say, Khan, but three years is a long time," Sumner said. "It seems that all I have done for the last two years is sit." He referred to the months spent in the hospital after his Trial of Position and the further months spent learning to use his prosthetic.

"In the cockpit perhaps," Ulric acknowledged. "We both know that you have developed one of the most intensive training programs among units in the entire invasion."

Sumner bowed slightly in acknowledgement.

"I will want a copy of your training syllabi later, perhaps I shall see it implemented in its entirety in Alpha Galaxy, if not the entire Clan."

"I will just have to develop a better one then, Khan."

Ulric laughed. "Humor, that is good. Now tell me what you think."

"Khan?"

Ulric did not speak for some minutes.

"What is the truth?" he asked.

Sumner looked at him askance.

"What is the truth, Star Captain," Ulric said, then went on. "The truth is that each Clan has its own version of the Truth. And that each of those truths is part of the Truth that the Great Father and the Founder left us. No Clan has sole custody of the Truth. If it had been the desire of the Founder that we should all share the Truth he would have made only one Clan. Instead he made twenty so that each might explore portions that that Truth. _Abtahka_ is just one of the ways he made it so that parts of different Truths could be examined and shared.

"So I will settle, for right now, you telling me what Truth the Blood Spirits hold."

Sumner inclined his head. "What are the Blood Spirits," he said. "My bond-holder posed this question to me about Clan Wolf and I spent the better part of a year answering it, Khan."

Ulric nodded.

"Simply," Sumner continued, "Clan Blood Spirit is about _oneness_. All are part of the whole. The laborers our muscles, the scientists our brain, the warriors our two fists. All train together, even the laborers receive rudimentary military training, because it binds us together. _Elan_, _esprit de corp_. Blood Spirit _is_. It is inside of us, who we are. There are…echoes of it inside Clan Wolf—inside all Clans I suspect. It is in the way warriors in the same unit walk together, hold themselves. As though we go around saying 'this is who we are, there is no one better'."

"Good answer," Ulric said. "Now I shall share a Truth with you, one that Clan Blood Spirit forgot."

Sumner Johns frowned slightly as he regarded his Khan.

"Clan Blood Spirit forgot that innovation did not die with the Founder. It still holds to the same table of organization the Founder set up, without the use of novas of mechanized battle armor infantry, though neither OmniMech nor elemental existed before he died. Of all the Clans it is among the most rigorous at holding to _zelbrigen_ when on the offensive. And yet, on the defensive, that fails to hold true."

Sumner stilled. What his former Clan did in the defense of its homeworld was well-known, but it was not talked about.

"You _innovated_," Ulric said. "Despite all of your former Clan's failure to perceive that Truth."

"You would have made an excellent Loremaster, sir," Sumner said, not quite believing he had the audacity to say it.

"I doubt it," Ulric said, "But I see your point. You see, Star Captain, it is not just you have been posting these difficult questions to. I have been asking them of most of Clan Wolf's _abtahka_, asking about different ways of seeing things. There is one I would have consulted, but she is no longer a Wolf, I am not sure what Clan she is in, actually. So what I want from you, is for you to tell me, what you think our two biggest problems are. They can be us as Clan Wolf, or regarding the entire invasion, I do not care."

Sumner Johns regarded him levelly for a moment, then turned back to the window. "I have two concerns, and yes, the affect all of the Clans present. First, aside from the Blood Spirits and Hells Horses, the Clans do not think highly of conventional forces. Blood Spirit knows that tanks are cheap compared to 'mechs. Inexpensive, and the Inner Sphere is vast, and the Great Father said 'there is a quality in quantity that is oftentimes forgot.'"

"He was quoting another man, but I take your point," Ulric said. "So you think they can swarm us with armor?"

"There are…advantages to armor," Sumner said. "It is not as large a target and is a more stable firing platform than a 'mech. But since we do not use much armor, most in the invasion save those who have experience against Clans Blood Spirit and Hells Horses—or are _abtahka_ from them—have no experience fighting armor. It is a weakness. Whether or not the spheroids can figure it out and develop something to attack that weakness I do not know."

Ulric nodded slowly. "And the second?"

"And the second are the people living on the worlds we liberate," Sumner Johns said. "As long as we can show them that our ways are superior over living under the corrupt Successor Lordlings, all shall be well. If we cannot convince them we shall have those who oppose us in our rear. Perhaps they shall oppose us violently, which in turn we shall suppress with violence."

"The matter will escalate," Ulric said.

"Yes," Sumner said. "The one thing we, the Clans, can _not_ afford is for the people of the Inner Sphere to decide that life under the Lordlings is better than the life that will be offered by the Star League Remade. It need only happen once, by one Clan on one planet, to turn all the people of the Inner Sphere against us. I do not think there are enough clusters in all the Clans to garrison the entire Inner Sphere if it comes to that."

Ulric nodded. "In this I agree. You have received my orders of the planets we conquer?"

"I have," Sumner said, keeping the mental frown at his Khan's choice of words off his face. "It seemed logical and well thought out to me."

"Good," Ulric said. "Now, about combat vehicles, is there anything else you can think of that you think I should know?"

"Not particularly," Sumner said. "Different kinds have different advantages, and in Blood Spirit, when I interacted with ground units it was to support them. I do recall reading once, however, that a ground combat vehicle is…

Present

…far simpler to modify to create a machine with a singular purpose than a 'mech is.

Sumner Johns recalled these words in an eye-blink. True enough they hadn't really encountered any before now, but being the first to discover this particular unpleasant surprise was an honor he could have well done without.

"Bravo-Four-Two is hit." Rena's voice was cool and collected.

Bravo-Four element had been in _Jengiz_, the same as Alpha-Five, and Sumner made a mental note that the enemy liked to target ECM-equipped units first. It was not much as far as patterns went, but it was something.

"They have violated _zellbrigen_, Beta Star engage!"

Sumner Johns wanted to order his pilots to belay that order, but it was too late. They would be able to rightfully claim that Rena and the other fighters to take damage that had not been challenged, had been damaged by deliberately flying through their fire. It would have been simple enough for them to have avoided being damaged by breaking off so that the units challenged could fight.

Garth Radick, he thought, would be unlikely to accept that explanation, but the Khan was a different matter, and both sides' battleroms would reveal the truth.

The enemy missile launchers had been pointing nearly vertical and were reloaded by the time his fighter binary passed by overhead. There was not enough time from the time Leo Leroux gave the command to the time they passed overhead for all of the pilots to get targeting solutions. More of the explosive-shrapnel ate at their tail armor, launchers flashed and four dozen more missiles came charging after them. The one saving grace was that the fire was spread out rather than concentrated on just four aerospace fighters.

He managed to only lose three more fighters, two from the small group that had initially been challenged, but the rest had all been badly damaged. It would take days, even with the modular systems of the OmniFighters, for the technicians to make good all the damage.

Enough. He had destroyed two of the enemy fighter squadrons, and gathered tactical data about three new enemy systems, including an air-defense tank.

"Break off," he ordered. "All units reform ten kilometers north-west, angels 5."

"Looks like they're breaking off."

"Looks like, Lucky," Bunny agreed softly. "Bravo Zulu, _Thunder God_, _Nomad_ Three and Four are buying the beer."


	10. Chapter 9

Location: Planting  
Time: H-Hour+51:47

**Combined Headquarters  
****41****st**** Avalon Hussers/3****d**** Cavalry **

"Your man dropped too far out," Hauptman-General Felix Steiner said.

"No, General, he didn't," Chaffee said. "What he did was rewrite his orders. He's still going to relieve pressure on us, but he's going to do it his way. Look." He touched an icon on the holographic command/tactical map. "They've already chopped one of those heavy companies the woofies are using from their main force to take his rear, and they're pulling another off the already small force they have covering their supply depot at the starport."

"And now he is going to let them cross the river and surround him," Felix said. "He will have a slight advantage in numbers, but these Clans tend to medium and heavy machines and despite your _übermechs_ they still outgun yours when facing mechs of the same weight-class. It would have been better if he had crossed the river and engaged one company with his full force, and then turned and engaged the second, rather than let them encircle him as they have."

His eyes narrowed. "Unless…during the drop he sowed the river with mines?"

"No," Chaffee said. "If I'm right the river was the landing zone for all of his _Aquahawks_." Off the other man's look he explained, "Marine Mobile Infantry in aquatic battle armor."

"Battle armor?" Steiner demanded. "You have powered battle armor for your infantry?"

"Some of them, yes," Chaffee said. "Not enough, not near enough, but some."

Steiner stiffened, his eyes flicking to the junior officers and NCOs in his OpsCenter who were all studiously paying attention to anything except the two senior officers.

"Just who are you people?" he asked in a low voice. "WarShips, DropShips that no one has used since before the Second Succession War, combat vehicles that haven't been seen since the Star League Defense Force vanished almost three centuries ago, technology that even the Royal units—by all accounts—did not have and these Clanners do…"

"A miss-jump," Chaffee said.

Steiner frowned. "Nobody else has the equipment you do. The Federated Commonwealth spans the breadth of the Inner Sphere and never have we heard of a unit equipped as yours. The closest are the Wolf Dragoons, and they had five regiments of Star League-era 'mechs. If the size of your fleet is anything like what we suspect it is, you out-number that by ten times over if not more."

"We don't. And not a miss-jump from where," Chaffee said softly. "One from _when_."

Steiner paled sharply. "Mein Gott," he whispered. "You're from the Star League Defense Force itself!"

"Not quite," Chaffee said. "Technically we are the last remnants of the Terran Hegemony Armed Forces."

Steiner blinked, and despite the shocking revelation he found himself twisting the new puzzle around in his mind. "I was under the impression that THAF was disbanded to form the Star League Defense Force-Royal Command at the time of creation of the Star League."

"They were, most of them," Chaffee acknowledged. "But at the time it wasn't really a popular move inside the services themselves. HighCom thought it presented a defensive weakness, created a vulnerability to the Hegemony, but there was some concern about the First Lord having access to both the SLDF and his own private House military. In the end the Royal Command gave him a _de facto_ one anyway, but technically it was part of the SLDF.

"However, there was a small unit of the Terran Hegemony was retained and seconded to the SLDF and used to provide a bodyguard unit to the Cameron family."

"The Royal Blackwatch," Steiner said, nodding slowly. "Who died almost to a man on Terra when the Usurper launched the Coup."

"The Blackwatch was our…public face, you could say," Chaffee said. "A select group of the very oldest units, units that had existed since well before mankind achieved powered flight. Frankly we were little more than caretakers, preserving the colors and battle honors of some of the oldest cavalry, marine, and artillery units. The fourth branch, Infantry, was accorded a single regiment. Tradition holds that the infantry branch won the honor of being our public face and a single full-strength unit in a poker game, though how the Blackwatch was chosen as _the_ Regiment over the other infantry units I don't know."

He paused. "I guess in a way our units are distant cousins, since if I remember my history correctly the Avalon Hussars were formed from Terran Alliance Marine Corps units. Some of them dated back as far as some of us."

Steiner nodded, "Yes, and we still hold to some of their traditions. I take it that when the Usurper overthrew House Cameron and destroyed the Blackwatch, you activated yourselves and recruited up to strength?"

"Something like that, anyway," Chaffee agreed. "Our major job before the coup was to field-test new equipment for the Blackwatch."

"I had wondered why your equipment was so much better than even the royal units were believed to have been equipped with," Steiner said.

"Yes, well, there were reasons for that," Chaffee admitted. "With so much of the SLDF's funding going into producing the Space Defense Systems it made a big dent in the ground-force's acquisitions programs. Mostly those were the research and development programs because the mech-design firms had too much political clout—lobbyists and campaign donations and _jobs_—to risk alienating.

"Some R&D programs kept running, and over forty or fifty years even a limited funding, especially on the scale of the SLDF, can provide amazing breakthroughs. Most of those were _expensive_ breakthroughs since making stuff affordable was one of the areas that was under-funded. And with how small our production runs were in perspective there was never any real incentive on the part of the manufacturers to make the things cheaper or for an economy of scale to build up. But funding to update the SLDF on a whole fell well behind. By the time the Fat Man killed the First Lord the Royal Command was at least one generation out of date.

"And keep in mind that even within the Royal Command there was a tiered system, and the same for the regular army. Mostly it was necessary because of the logistic constraints. Before the Periphery War, there were over forty-three _hundred_ individual regiments of all types in the SDLF. Reequipping even a fraction of something that size spread throughout something the size of the Inner Sphere was a major undertaking.

"Aside from us, only the Blackwatch was armed with the absolute latest and best and the Fat Man nuked most of _their_ assembly and storage areas early in the coup. And then he was forced to nuke Colonel Schmidt's survivors on the Gorst Flats after they ravaged one of his dragoon regiments. I think she had something like a disorganized company there; we never really recovered enough records to be sure.

"And then during the war things got confused and some of the differences stopped mattering a great deal. There were more than a few non-Royal units that ended up with Royal gear, mostly the earlier-generation stuff that they were soon going to be upgraded to if the war hadn't broken out, but even then there were exceptions. What happened after, well, I suppose after we left?"

"Kerensky deserted," Steiner said. "Honesty compels me to add that the House Lords probably didn't give him much of a choice. So he left, took something like eighty percent of the Defense Force with him and set off for parts unknown. Then we spent the next two and a half centuries blasting the Inner Sphere, and ourselves, to pieces. The politically correct and official version is somewhat different, of course."

"Of course," Chaffee said. "Does anything remain of the Hegemony or the Star League?"

"No," Steiner said. "The House Lords appointed a man named Blake to run the Interstellar Communications Ministry after they stripped Kerensky of Protectorship. He reformed it into an organization called ComStar."

Chaffee nodded slowly, "Jerry Blake, sounds like. I know of him, but we never met. Good guy—helped us get a bunch of the HPG stations working so that we could use them and Amaris couldn't tap into our comms."

"It sounds like the same person," Steiner said. "ComStar holds Terra and claim to be neutral. There were units of the SLDF that chose to remain. Most were absorbed into the various armies of the House Lords, the Crucis Lancers of the Federated Suns were initial formed by such units. The 3rd Regimental Combat Team remains—"

"Eridani Light Horse? Ezra Bradley's troops?" Chaffee asked. "Lord, they were good."

"They still are," Steiner said. "Went mercenary—though they'd take exception if you said it to their face—but still hold to many of their old traditions."

"Let me guess, 1037/42(b)."

"Excuse me?"

"SLDF Regulation 1037/42(b)," Chaffee said. "It's a reg that allows a unit cut off from SLDF command and logistical support to second itself to an SLDF associated command—basically a member of the Star League, voting or associated—and participate in operations, from self-defense and garrison up to and including combat. In exchange the associated power has to provide logistical support, including parts and maintenance as well as troop pay and victualling."

Steiner blinked. "The SLDF field regulations made provisions for units to hire themselves out as mercenaries?"

"No," Chaffee said, peering closely at the tac-map. "Way back when the House Lords were using SLDF troops for things like disaster relief inside their boarders," he continued absently. "You know, a major 'quake hits, bring in troops to help prevent looting, dig out the bodies, build temporary housing, that sort of thing. Since the SLDF was paying they got disaster relief for free. Actually, they were getting paid to use them because of certain automatic disaster relief payments that were supposed to be used to transport _their_ troops around."

"Ah," Steiner said. "By requiring that the House Lords pay for the units' upkeep they were no longer free. I take it the regulation was worded that way so that unit commanders would have a way to keep their units operational were contact with SLDF command or logistics to be lost?"

"Pretty much." Chaffee pulled up a graphic, studied it for a moment, then punched a query into the computer and grunted at the results. "My son-in-law is getting bold," he said.

"Is he indeed? I would have thought that there would have been regulations against having people of so close a relationship in the same chain of command."

"There are, were, you'd be surprised how many regulations start getting ignored once the bullets start flying," Chaffee said. He paused and looked at Steiner, "then again, maybe not. Besides, it wasn't official. The wedding wasn't for another couple of months."

Steiner gave him a considering look, then turned back to the holographic tacmap. "Shit," he observed.

"Pretty much," Chaffee agreed.

"What did you mean about his boldness?"

Chaffee touched a control and two icons that were upstream from the enemy 'mechs entering the water, glowed gently. "Swimmer Support Vessels, each _Aquahawk_ platoon has one. Fully submersible, twenty-ton semi-modular bay that can hold a chamber for combat swimmers, or a cargo bay, or both."

"And you don't think that these Clan-people will notice them?" Steiner asked. "Combat wet-naval vessels are starting to make a resurgence; true, but only because many of the technologies and weapons that made them obsolescent have been lost. It was my understanding that the SLDF wet-navy units suffered disproportionate casualties during the Amaris war."

"True enough…mostly."

"Oh?"

"Major surface combatants were death traps, their vulnerability to orbital units and inability to engage the same was efficiently ended their service life. There was some talk shortly before Vandenburg went sideways about a new system that would have allowed a large enough wet-ship to mount a Capital-class weapon, something having to do with a spin-off from the weapon cradles developed for the planetary defense stations, but nothing really came of it before, well…before. Likewise advances in sub-surface warfare, especially in sensors, removed submarines' greatest asset. Missile bodies with staged torpedo warheads had been around for centuries and only gotten better, and they weren't the only weapon. On the other hand the littoral environment would never go away and equipment and vessels geared towards operations in that environment were useful in a lot of ways.

"Then too remember our origins. _All_ of our origins. The Marines were traditionally experts in amphibious warfare. They took a very serious look at what was happening to the threat environment, and came up with new weapons and techniques for it. The _Tarawa_-class landing craft is one example. Essentially it's a spheroid dropship that can only land in water, it has a unique sensor suite for air, surface, and subsurface environments; a complex ballast-system that can allow it to submerge which neatly removes it from orbital threats, it has a truly amazing array of anti-air weapons, and forty-two centimeter guns for naval gunfire support that has enough range to allow it to anchor far enough from land to minimize the threat of land-based weapons. Incidentally, the gun provides more firepower than any conventional artillery unit, and neatly side-steps the Ares Conventions in regards to orbital fire support."

"Very nice. I don't suppose…?"

"Sorry, sir," Chaffe said. "There's only a couple with us, and they're a pain to recertify for spaceflight. Command has decided that we're it. At least for now."

Steiner nodded. "It was a thought. But these submarines, they are very much inside the 'mech threat zone. Do they too carry some type of wonder-weapon?"

"Not really, just some new applications of very old technology…suitably updated of course."

"Can you tell me about them?" Steiner asked. He gestured to the holographic command/tactical-map. "It appears as though we have time, after all."

"In broad outlines, I simply don't know more," Chaffee qualified. "They're around fifty tons a piece, maybe a bit more, and have some kind of electronic drive that is really quiet and doesn't have a betraying neutrino signature. Depth is controlled via a flexible bladder filled with ammonia inside the ballast chambers. They do something to the ammonia that makes it expand or contract, which removes machinery noises from changing depth. The hull is faceted, some kind of really old stealthy building technique, but covered with radar-transparent and sound-neutral gel-packs that minimize water flow-noise. The hull itself is made of some composite or other that doesn't show up on mag-scans. I understand there is even some kind of complex system that can analyze an active sonar search and bounce back a sound wave that looks like nothing is there."

"Weapons?" Steiner asked interestedly.

"None at all," Chaffee said. "Besides what they carry in their cargo bay, that is. They didn't even bother putting armor on it because it isn't supposed to be in combat. On the other hand the drive and engine systems are sufficiently outsized to make it a good towing platform, which is partially how it deploys and retrieves battlearmor since the bay can't hold a whole Marine platoon."

He stabbed a finger into the three-dimensional light show and one of the SSVs was highlighted. A close-up of the vessel hung in the air above the tactical display, and information began to scroll down in the air next to it.

"It looks like a fifteen-ton medic/transport/docking unit was been put in the bay. He probably is going to use it to take prisoners of any survivors as well as for medical evac of wounded Marines."

"You doubt this?" Steiner asked off his frown.

"No, not really. It's just…" Chaffee shook his head. "Look at their direction of movement."

Steiner frowned.

"SeaSled," Chaffee said. "Two of them hidden here, inside this old wrecked bulk freighter."

"And what, if I may ask, is SeaSled? Some kind of towed cargo pod?"

"That's right," Chaffee affirmed. "The Marines use them to set up temporary underwater bases, but they can be used for general cargo. No real point to using it that way. They only hold thirty tons a piece. Those are effectively SpecWar boats, not cargo haulers. They might be able to resupply one company of 'mechs if they favor energy weapons, but I doubt they could be used to keep a larger unit in beans and bullets over the long term. Not without a lot more of them. You could stick people in them I suppose, but unlike the SSVs the sleds don't have all that fancy stealth tech built into them. Battlearmor hitches rides on the side of the sub because a couple dozen suits is less drag than one sled, and I can't think of any place where I'd need fifty tons of normal combat swimmers—that's including the bay inside the sub.

"Now, he's loaded the pods with CAPTOR and SeaArrow, which is an interesting choice, but I'd have thought he'd deploy them instead of hiding them like that."

"What is captor? SeaArrow sounds like a sub-surface launched arrow artillery."

"Which are?"

"CAPTOR is an acronym, something-TORpedo. Basically it's an underwater mine that spits out a torpedo when something meets its targeting parameters, and you're right about SeaArrow, though it's actually a series of different systems. In this case a launcher that'll float to just under the surface, and when commanded it'll spit out a missile that will then fly a specific target profile. The range is reduced over standard land-based launchers and the single-shot launchers themselves are bulky and can't be reused, which isn't a small thing."

"He is going to use his Marines, they will come as much a surprise to the clanners as they do to me," Steiner said, touching the map so that icons bloomed into existence in mid-air. "More, because they are in combat. They will thin out the ranks of this first company, which would expect mines since we have used them in the past. Then he will deploy SeaArrow against the second, and once in the water they will look for Marines in battle armor, and instead find CAPTOR."

"And that'll leave him free to take his full force to clean up the survivors, before marching on the starport," Chaffee finished.

"As you said, bold," Steiner grunted. "Very bold.

"They can't have many forces left there to fend him off, likewise they can't have much more in orbit other than the squadrons that _Black Lion_ has and he's inside their line of march if they try to reinforce from their main attack force. I doubt he'll be able to capture the supply base intact for us, but he can certainly blow it up."

"Oh he isn't going to go for the supplies," Chaffee said. "Those would hurt the woofies. He doesn't going to hurt them, he wanted to _beat_ them. I have ten pounds, which I don't suppose are good anymore, that says his main strike is going to be those dropships. If he can take them the woofies are stranded here until they can bring someone else into the system.

"We're going to get hammered in the mean time, but it'll be a win."

"Unless they loose those aerospace fighters on him," Steiner said. "They have enough of them, although they have been strangely reluctant to use them against us. But after yesterday you don't have any forces to oppose them, do you?"

"Not really," Chaffee said grimly. "_Pegasus_ Troop was wiped out, and _Nomad_ and _Outlaw_ Troops have been reduced to a grand total of five vertols, sixty percent of which are too shot up to be combat effective. But _Pegasus_ got off its mission first and cratered their landing strips, hit the tower, blew up the hydrogen farm, did some other damage too. Left behind runway denial explosives—cluster-bomb sub-munitions that'll do a landing gear.

"_Nomad_, _Outlaw_, and _Thunder God_ got seven kills, and the other thirteen in the force they fought had to be badly damaged, some of them critically so. _Pegasus_ had a stronger anti-air detail and got another two, and the Cybers prevented ground crews from warning the fighters about damage to the runways. They have something like two dozen fighters down with crippled landing gear if my intelligence reports are right.

"There's a good chance that Paladin has this won, now we just need to keep the rest of our troops alive long enough for him to do the job."

"And keep the local woofies from objecting," Steiner said. He paused for a moment. "Why do you call him Paladin?"

"He was with the Regiment on Earth when the Fat Man launched his coup," Chaffee said.

Steiner looked at him blankly.

"The Blackwatch," Chaffee said.

"He was one of the ones that the Usurper missed?" Steiner asked. "The ones that launcher a guerilla war against him?"

"No," Chaffee said. "He was one of the handful that escaped off-world. The only one still alive. The story goes like this…"

**Sol III  
****Hilton Head**,

There was a discreet knock on the door, and a soft voice issued from a hidden intercom. "Precentor ROM to see the Primus."

"Send him in, Jeffery."

There was a pause, and then the antique solid-oak door to Myndo Waterly's private study opened and a dapper little man walked in. He was short, with a round face, broad smile, and slightly rotund belly. In short, he looked more like someone's favorite uncle than he did the master of one of the most feared intelligence organizations that had ever existed. And while he was most definitely the latter, the former impression would not have been incorrect, something that he had used with a great deal of success when it came to interrogating the enemy's of the Blessed Blake during his long career.

"The Blessings of Blake be upon you, Primus," he said, nodding a bow of acknowledgement, his eyes flicking briefly at the woman dressed in acolytes' robes, before returning to the leader of ComStar.

"Thank you, Charles," Myndo said, "It is so good that you could join us. Tea?" she asked, deliberately phrasing the greeting so that her thanks could be interpreted for his greeting or his simply showing up for this meeting.

"If you please," Charles said. It was interesting how after denying their former nations how some members of the order would latch on to something of their heritage and bring it with them. Myndo Waterly's tea, which she served hot in little handless mugs, was just one of them.

He settled into the comfortable armchair in the conversational nook in one corner of the Primus' rather large private study. The Primus poured the tea herself, passing the first mug to him, then to the acolyte, before taking a third mug for herself.

Charles sipped to be polite, and then raised an eyebrow. "A new blend, Primus?" he asked. He'd never made an effort to study the Combine's Tea Ceremony, but he knew the basic rules—as he knew a great many other things about other cultures that frequently amounted to no more than trivia. So until the Primus talked business, he would keep the conversation light, polite, and focused on tea.

"Yes," she told him. "Do you like it?"

"It is an interesting blend," he replied, "but I am not a connoisseur of teas."

"Oh very good, Charles," Myndo said with a light laugh. She set aside her teacup and her expression grew serious.

Charles did the same, glad that the polite chit-chat was over, and glanced pointedly at the other woman in the room.

"I know who you are, Precentor," she said. "My name is Mary Pat Foley."

"The name doesn't ring a bell," he said.

"Nor should it," she said. "It is fictitious."

"Ms. Foley works for you," Myndo said. "Albeit…indirectly, most of the time. In the future I suspect that she will report to you directly."

"I don't suppose she has a real name?" Charles asked.

"No, Precentor," Foley said softly, "I do not."

He stared at her.

"Charles," Myndo said, smiling as he flushed when he remembered in whose private study he was. "I would have your report now."

Charles shrugged slightly. "As of yet I do not have much of anything to report, Primus. Give me a few days for my sources to get better information and send it to me."

"No," Myndo said coldly. "Already I have received demands about why these…people were not included in our intelligence summary of the units defending Planting. It is imperative that I learn at least what you already know. Now. Before additional questions can be put to us."

"I see," Charles said softly. He reached into a pocket and came out with a hand-comp that he opened. "Per our standing agreement, the HPG system stopped transmitting shortly after the Clan forces made planet-fall. One cluster of Clan Wolf's Beta Galaxy, plus its command unit, in case you are interested, though it retained a second cluster in orbit."

"I am not interested," Myndo Waterly said flatly. "These new people?"

"We have perhaps a half-dozen names, and three units. The units are Task Force TH-X1138, the SLS _Mercy_, and 3d Cavalry Regiment, 'Brave Rifles'. There were also a half-dozen or so names.

"I consulted our databases and discovered that during the Amaris-Kerensky Civil War there was a Task Force so-named. There was not much more information than that, the file had obviously been scrubbed, perhaps during the war or immediately after. There was no listing of assigned units, loses, or even location of where it had fought.

"The SLS _Mercy_ was a hospital ship, one of the many fleet-train components constructed from _Quixote_-class hulls. It was listed as re-entering the docks for refit four years before the coup. There is no listing of it coming out, or how it was refit—which was suspiciously early in its life for its class.

"A 3d Cavalry Troop nicknamed the Brave Rifles was also found. It was assigned to the Royal Blackwatch as a testing and evaluation unit. The unit itself dated back to the mid nineteenth century. I launched a search for other units that were similarly assigned to the Blackwatch, but all of my computer searches can back 'file not found', which suggests that this information has also been scrubbed."

"And the personnel files linked to persons who had been members of the Star League Defense Force at one point in time, but who had left it before the coup. No further information was available. Is this correct?"

"Yes," Charles said, glancing at the acolyte.

"So you don't know anything, is that correct?" Myndo asked acidly.

"No," Charles said flatly. "From the way that Clan Wolf queried us we can tell that they are…concerned about this unit. That in turn suggests it is a more potent combat force than they are used to face. If I were to speculate based on what we know, this 3d Cavalry Regiment is the same as the 3d Cavalry Troop. That during the Amaris-Kerensky Civil War they were off Terra during the coup, and recruited up to regimental-strength."

"Planting is an agricultural world," Foley observed. "Perhaps General Kerensky intended to use it to secure victualling for the Star League Defense Force. The math has always suggested that a miss-jump could cause a ship to miss-place itself in time. In this case they are likely equipped with Star League experimental machines. Not equal to those of Clan Wolf, mayhap, but certainly superior to any that the House Lords have in general production."

Myndo looked at Charles and raised an eyebrow.

"It is possible, I suppose," he acknowledged. "I am not a hyper-physicist."

"Find out, Charles," Myndo said. "All that you can. Adept Foley will try to infiltrate their organization and will report back to you. Pick someone else to make contact and see if you can subvert them to the Blessed Blake's cause. At the least I need you to determine if we can manipulate them like we can the Clans. I will need accurate intelligence about their organization and equipment in the event it becomes necessary to send the Clans after these people."

"Understood," Charles said simply, though he raised a mental eyebrow at Foley's rank.

"Good. Get out."

Charles stood and offered Myndo another short bow. "Blake's Will be done, Primus."

"Yes," Myndo said softly, "it _will_ be done. _I_ will make sure of it."

**Command Deck  
****GSS **_**Eureka**_

"Speak your piece, Captain."

Star Commodore Manfred Steele, who had once been dubbed 'Snoopy' by the senior instructor in his aerospace training sibko and had spent a good portion of his career trying to live it down, resisted the urge to roll his eyes. There was a time he would have objected, just like Star Captain Atlantia would have objected to be addressed by any rank other than 'Star Major' outside of the ground troop quarters.

There were some in his crew who found the 'promotion' to be borderline-heretical, but he also knew that far more of them just grinned. Even among the seekers Atlantia had a reputation for being…odd. That reputation was only enhanced by her not being just a seeker, but _the_ Seeker. The unofficial head of the whole movement who answered personally to the Loremaster.

He had understood why she addressed him as 'Captain', the Clan's did not retain the rank, though they did retain the post. But it had taken Manfred weeks to work around to the reason for the self-promotion. It was not particularly clan-like to beat around the bush, but nor was advancing one's self in such a fashion.

"No doubt, Star-Commodore, you wonder why I insist on styling myself Star-Major," she had said quite unexpectedly at dinner one evening. "The reason is quite simple. No ship may have two Captains. So, to avoid a potentially disastrous misunderstanding at a critical juncture, and to avoid the presumption that I hold a post that I have neither the desire nor skill to hold, I sacrifice a little of my honor. I make it willingly, and I make it openly by taking a rank that no Clan has or recognizes."

It was also, Manfred reflected, the last time he had been addressed by his clan-style rank rather than the job he held. He could still remember the day when his Khan, Ariel Survorov, had called him into her office and told him that she had a mission for him. A mission that would likely as not prove to be one way, and could lead to everyone involved being abjured from the Clans. A mission that would require a crew of volunteers; from him to the technicians, and from the ground combat element to the lowliest laborer. A mission under the command of an aging freebirth Star Captain, his junior in rank with no blood-name and well past the age when most Clans would have relegated a warrior to a _solahma_ unit.

He had started to refuse, but then the second woman in the office had stood and began to speak.

"The drive and battery both have a full charge, we are cleared to jump," Manfred said.

"Which is your way of asking me where we are going next," Atlantia said dryly.

"Aff," Manfred said, looking at the three-dimensional holographic star-chart she was examining. Truth be told, working with her had proven far easier than he had expected. She decided on targets, though she did consult on it, and together they decided how to address them.

Two bandit camps on the outskirts of the Kerensky Cluster, and a pirate base in the Periphery attested to how well they worked together. None had been challenging or brought much honor or glory, but even a only slightly battle-tested command relationship was a useful thing.

Atlantia reached a hand into the holomap and cupped a red giant that had never attained more than a catalog number. The familiar thin blue lines indicating a thirty light-year sphere, and a sixty light-year shell sprang into existence.

"A man on horseback and beset by wolves," she said, manipulating the map so that it swam out. "Clan Wolf has attacked or is attacking these systems," a rash of red spilled across the map. "Likewise we can remove those that have been attacked Jade Falcons, Smoke Jaguars, Ghost Bears…" stars winked out as each of the other invading clans was named. "On one of these worlds…"

"It could be world that will not be attacked this wave, but instead wait until the next or even the one after it," Manfred said. "Or even some place that they have already been to."

"Mayhap," Atlantia said with a nod. She thought for a moment before manipulating the map further. Many of the red lights went out. "The wolves pursued him…they cannot do that if no forces make it off-world." A few dots remained, many concentrated along the line of worlds that Clan Wolf was currently fighting on.

"The Rock. The mercenaries the Wolves fought there were well-trained and equipped as far as the Spheroids are concerned."

"No," Atlantia. "The man we are looking for _believes_, Manfred. He believes hard. I have no doubt that if he were forced to it he would sell his services. But his armor was brightly polished, his horse's coat shone. He was not been pushed to that yet."

"So not Alleghe or the Edge. Chateau, perhaps, or New Caledonia?"

"Federated Commonwealth, or the Free Rasalhague Republic," Atlantia said. "The Tenth Donegal was by all reports gutted, and the Second Drakens were last seen heading for Rasalhague. Khan Ulric Kerensky has the Wolves Alpha Galaxy camped out just waiting to take the system, and I would be very surprised if he has not yet struck. I am disinclined to try following into that. I would much prefer to slip past the lines and get ahead of the invasion force and look for the Knight from the other side."

"Something recent then. In addition to Rasalhague the Wolves have attacks going in against Ridderkerk, Planting, Harvest, Mozirje, Feltre, and Yantaa."

"Feltre has already fallen, while Yantaa and Ridderkerk have not yet been attacked…"

"The Tenth Donegal was spotted on Yantaa."

"Hmm…a possibility then. What of Mozirje? No, wait, the Mozirje Red Division? Never mind. Harvest?" Atlantia asked, reaching in to cup a star. Data codes blossomed around it like a spring flower bursting into bloom.

"First and Second Royal Harvest Divisions…look like they are second-line troops," Manfred said.

"Militia and reservists. Civilians with military training like the Blood Spirits give theirs. The Inner Sphere armies regard them the way many Clans regard _solahma_ or freebirth units, only we are more honest about what we expect them to do."

"Unskilled cannon-fodder, then."

"Neg."

The reply came with such fierceness it caused Manfred to look up at her.

"It is the height of foolishness to equate honor or status with skill. A bullet does not care who fires it, if it strikes you in the skull you are dead. Mercenaries lack honor as we see it, but they are still faithful to their paychecks and contracts, quiaff? Yet the Wolves were so impressed by an 'honor-less' mercenary that he is know a bondsman to them and is progressing rapidly on the path to becoming a warrior. The Wolves have deployed an entire Galaxy of freebirths and solahma units, and are now taking so many worlds that the ilKhan is reported to be frothing at the mouth he is so enraged at them showing up his Krispy Kitties."

Despite himself Manfred snorted. Disparaging clans other than one's own was a long and treasured tradition, but Atlantia was better at it than most. He recovered and nodded an acknowledgement of her point because she _was_ a freeborn and she _was_ old enough to be _solahma_. Rumor had even put her as likely to retire from the ranks of warriors to spend the rest of her life tending the Temple where the Seekers brought the artifacts they had found.

"These second line units they are like _solahma_ units," she went on in a somewhat softer tone. "Some are purely secondary and some are much worse. Others are nearly as good as what the Inner Sphere considers front-line units.

"These may be second- and third-line units, but they fight for their homes. Tell me, Captain, who has more courage, a warrior facing another warrior who is his equal in every way over a scrape of dirt…or a warrior standing up to another warrior who is his superior in skill, training, and equipment in defense of his homeland?"

"Aff, I see your point," Manfred said slowly. "But they will still lose."

"Most assuredly," Atlantia said. "All the courage in the galaxy will gain you nothing if you have not the tools with which to effectively fight. What of Planting?"

"The 41st Avalon Hussars are headquartered there," Manfred said. "They are under-strength. It looks like they have a full compliment of BattleMechs, but only two battalions of armor and one wing of aerospace fighters. Odd, they are led by a Hauptman General named Steiner."

"Steiner?" Atlantia repeated.

Manfred shrugged. "Many of the senior officers in the Federated Commonwealth are still posted to units of either the Federated Suns or the Lyran Commonwealth, but there are a few who are posted to the other's units. This must be one of them. The fact that the 41st is so poorly manned explains why he is not a marshal."

"It is near the edge of the Jade Falcon corridor," Atlantia mused. "Avalon Hussars led by a Steiner." She stroked her fingers through the map and the star-chart shifted to center on Planting, blue lines indicated the one- and two-jump limits, while more connected the other closest systems with inhabited planets.

"Excellent connections," Manfred said. "You could dominate a sphere a hundred light-years across from here. Larger, if you could use it to choke off the jump points of other planets."

"In that case let us chart a course for this area," Atlantia said. "Stick to uninhabited systems still, if you please. And we had best make sure to keep _Dire Wolf_ informed."

"Still observing the progress of Operation Revival?" Manfred asked.

"Yes, and I will wish to send Khan Ulric a message congratulating him on winning the bid against the Ghost Bears and on the strategy that will allow him to win with less than sixty percent of the cutdown." She paused, "I will also need to make sure to ask him to avoid any museums."

"Do you know how he is going to do it?" Manfred asked.

"It?"

"Win with so few forces."

"If you are asking what strategy I think he will use, I will tell you that your guess is as good as mine. If you are asking why I think _he_ thinks he can win with so few forces in such a short time, I suggest that you would find your answers in the _Hitchhiker's Guide to the Free Rasalhague Republic_. Check out the planetary data on Rasalhague, especially the medical sections."

A/N: The group that I played with (back when I actually played), tended to campaign around in the Amaris-Kerensky Civil War. There were a couple of reasons we did this, part of it due to the sheer size of the war and another because of a lack of published material such as scenario packs and mech and armor designs (especially on the part of the Rim Worlds Republic) allowed us to design our own. Towards the end someone proposed using a miss-jump (a la _Living Legends_). Several of us did some prep-work, but the group disbanded before anything could come of it.

Then one day I was cleaning out a closet and came across my old notes and…well.

For the record, we always did assume that there were varying levels of equipment in use by the SLDF, more than just the two implied tiers. Modern militaries don't switch over to new gear all at once, no reason the SLDF—which is both far larger and spread over a vaster area—would. Nor is there a reason they wouldn't keep the very best stuff for their elite bodyguard unit.

Since I do have, or can reconstruct, a fair portion of the mechs and vehicles, if there is sufficient interest I'll consider making a Field Manual-style post with some technical stuff thrown in. I'll point out that most of the stuff falls under a fairly extensive set of House Rules we came up with and that I _don't_ have a complete copy of them. But as I said, if there is an interest out there…


	11. Chapter 10

**Daltron Meander  
****Planting**

Dale scowled as light from the surface faded. He really should have offered to move his trinary back once the other man had offered to withdraw his artillery, and let _him_ deal with this mess. The river was silt-ridden. Visibility even with the high-intensity running lights on was better measured in centimeters than meters. Radar was useless because the river seemed to be the primary landing sight for all of the metal junk that had been rained down during the drop. The same metal residue was highly magnetized, rendering Magnetic Anomaly Detection gear useless due to data flooding. The debris was bouncing sonar just fine, but about half the time it bounced sound waves away from Dale Carns' 'mechs, creating distorted images as his 'mechs' computers tried to make sense of it.

The only good news, if it could be called that, was that the scores of faint power sources from the ECM decoys could be easily read. It wasn't as good as a full map of the river bottom, but he didn't have one of those. There was still a lot of area where there wasn't one, which could hide the location of a deep hole or even a non-so deep one that would be impossible to extricate a 'mech from. However, there was a solution to that particular bit of bad news.

He turned to a tac-map and began plotting waypoints, using the power sources as way markers.

1st Lieutenant Leland Smythwick, THMC, smiled a slow, predatory smile. When Lieutenant Colonel Dominguez had briefed him on the op he'd thought the man crazy. Lying down in the bottom of a river—even one as big and deep as the Dantron Meander—wasn't an issue, the _Aquahawks_ (technically MkXXIIIc _Nighthawk_, but nobody called them that) was rated for much deeper. The problem was that despite the best stealth features built into the armor without resorting to a purpose-built stealth suit, the _Aquahawk_s still were a ton worth of ceramite, Marine, and weapons and were not exactly unnoticeable.

Powering down virtually every system in his battle armor helped—at least the rather obvious power-emission signature was reduced to a fraction of its normal intensity—but try as they might certain systems couldn't be totally shut down. Not if you wanted the Marine in the armor to actually be able restart it. And then there were those systems that had to be maintained just to keep the Marine alive. The armor wasn't designed with a purely mechanical breathing apparatus after all, and then there was the radio which needed at least enough power to receive the order to power up, and then one couldn't ignore the plumbing connections…

_Especially_ not the plumbing connections.

Against Rimmers with their original tech it was easy enough, not simple, but easy. Even against the military equipment of the Great Houses it was possible, and they had tested it against much of the equipment that had brought with people when they'd joined in the quest to liberate Terra. Against the tech supplied to some Hegemony (but not Royal) units? Not without a whole lot of help. Royal-gear or better? Effectively impossible.

But effectively impossible wasn't the same thing as totally impossible.

True enough one could hide battle armor by burying it deep enough and packed around with material that would absorb its power-emission signature. To get it past modern ground-penetrating radar that was very deep, so deep that a quick response was nearly impossible. Other methods that had similar effects also had similar problems.

Certain materials could also be used. The coffin-like pods used to ship and stow 'cold' armor that wasn't fitted to a Marine were impenetrable to modern sensors—or at least what had been modern sensors—but even as they hid their contents it was readily apparent that they _were_ hiding something.

A third way would have been to use specially-adapted armor with advanced stealth systems. The _Stealthhawks_ could have pulled off the part where they weren't to be detected without a problem. But they weren't designed for underwater ops and could carry less than fifteen percent of their mass as 'mission gear', and the volume that each suit had to cram it into was severely limited.

That wasn't acceptable, which had meant _Aquahawks_, and meant in turn one Leland Smythwick had to come up with a solution. There was a very old maxim that if you could see a target you could hit it, and if you could hit it you could kill it. And it _was_ effectively impossible to hide even a mostly powered-down _Aquahawk_.

At this depth a direct hit might not even be necessary to get a kill. A minor armor breech wouldn't be instantly fatal (unless the Marine was really unlucky and the breech was in the helmet) but it might very well be impossible for a Marine to surface in time. A not-so minor breech that got through all of the armor and under-layers would almost certainly be fatal as water slammed into a human (with his or her delicate human physiology) at more than seven kilos to the square centimeter, which was roughly the same as dropping a mid-sized turkey on an area the size of an old-fashioned postage stamp.

It took a _lot_ of postage stamps to cover the average adult human.

But, as Major Talbot—who really wasn't all that bad for a Cavalry-puke—had pointed out, as long as they dropped right into the river and didn't dawdle there was no reason why they should be seen above the surface.

As far as below the surface went he had quoted another, equally ancient maxim, about the best place to hide something being in plain sight. Leland had slowly grinned, because the Marines had a _lot_ of experience at fighting underwater, and almost as much practice at manipulating underwater environments. A sufficiently large number of the decoy pods with their ECM burst-transmitters wouldn't hide their suits, but they would throw out a lot of false data points. It was, after all, what they were designed to do. Radar and sonar reflectors, magnetic anomalies, even slightly distorted heat sources.

With this in mind the Marine's SSV-LLD (Swimmer Support Vessel-Logistics and Landing Detachment) had landed with Colonel Chaffee's ground and air cavalry squadrons. By the time Major Talbot and one Lieutenant Smythwick were heading for the ground three potential battlefields had been prepared. There hadn't been enough time to prep them in as much depth as Leland could have wished, but by doubling the manning and working the equipment harder than was really good for it, they had managed.

And one of them, fortunately, had been in almost the right place for it. It was slightly out of the way to the Cavalry's way of thinking, and had given the opposing 'mech forces a chance to encircle them which the Cavalry probably didn't care for. Leland wasn't quite sure they felt that way, after all being surrounded just simplified matters of finding a target, but then the Cavalry always was a little odd. Even better—at least to the Marine's way of thinking—it had a shipwreck that was old enough to have marine growth on it, recent enough to still be structurally stable, and big enough to hold two SeaSled pods full of munitions. A convenient bend in the river provided a place to hide the Swimmer Support Vessels out of the prying eyes of woofie radar and sonar, while still being close enough to quickly support the Marines in battlefield cleanup and deploying the CAPTOR mines and SeaArrow pods.

In the end there were only two real concerns. First, while all of the tricks employed had been practiced and used effectively against Amaris, his units had only ever fielded Royal-grade armor, weapons, and other so-called 'battle' gear. Sensors, ECM suites, and other 'soft' gear had been upgraded, but only to SLDF-standard. Even those who really should have known better, such as the vaunted Republican Guards, had only rarely employed Royal-grade support systems. There was no evidence that the same techniques would be as effective against opponents with even better equipment.

The second issue was numbers. Aside from a few spares still in stores he had every _Aquahawk_ available. An already difficult and slow resupply chain had been reduced to no resupply chain at all. Any suit damaged beyond repair was gone for good. If the Woofies had any inkling they were there, if the surprise was anything less than total or even simply not as effective as hoped for because their weapons and armor were more effective than anticipated, he was going to take crippling losses—_permanent_ losses—and might very well not pull off his objectives.

If Leland was to be honest with himself, and he desperately didn't want to have to be but didn't see much choice in the matter, even if he did pull off a complete surprise, if they adapted to his presence fast enough he could _still_ take crippling losses and achieve very little except for the dying part. That they had battle armor of their own was certainly a strike against him. In fact, despite more than a decade of war with battle armor, they almost certainly had a better grasp of its advantages and disadvantages because they clearly deployed it more widely than the Marine Mobile Infantry had ever been able to.

He ran the numbers again and didn't like them any better than he had the previous half-dozen times. Two platoons, each with three squads, each with two fire-teams. Five suits plus a corporal to a fire-team, two fire-teams plus a sergeant to a squad, three squads, plus a staff sergeant, a clerk, a pair of Navy hospital corpsmen, and a lieutenant to a platoon.

On paper.

What he actually had was one lieutenant (himself), one Staff Sergeant (who led the second platoon), five sergeants, and ten fireteams of anywhere from full-compliment to two-thirds strength, plus the clerks and corpsman—though the medicos were aboard the support subs and not in battlearmor, and in any case of strictly limited utility in the fighting part of the battle.

62—61, rather, since Sergeant Hamilton hit the water funny and was out of combat with suit damage—men and women, total, out of a book-strength of 82, 90 if one included the heavy weapon squad that was assigned on paper. If one included the purely theoretical command detachment with its extra clerks, corpsman, the very small staff that he was technically authorized, and an officer to take over 1st Platoon, establishment came up to a hundred suits. Twenty-five to thirty-two percent under establishment (not counting the command detachment), and if they hadn't found replacements and armor for some of the casualties from the Liberation before leaving Earth for their deep space anchorage the situation would have been worse.

Twenty-five, Leland decided. When he wrote up his after-action report he'd mark it as twenty-five. The Colonel had offered him a heavy weapons squad. Offered two of them actually, but they would have been equipped with the standard Mk XXIIIa _Blackhawk_ armor which, while a fine system, was not optimized for underwater combat. Under the circumstances he had decided to use only one kind of armor so the he had no one to blame for not having the support weapons than himself.

Leland flexed his legs, then his shoulders, then his arms, and finally his hands. He wasn't able to move them of course. Even the strongest man does not simply _move_ when encased in a ton of armor and sensors and weapons. Then he reached out with his jaw and brought up the command-map display and—after double-checking to make sure that his transmitter was secure—began in a hushed voice to designate targets. His suit with its minimal power source might be just another burned-out ECM transmitter to those folks getting in the water, but the last thing he really needed was for them to deploy hydrophones and pick him up on old-fashioned passive-acoustic sonar. It was another old adage that no plan survived contact with the enemy—there was a reason, after all, they were called the enemy—but there was an equally old exception being the first few seconds of a properly executed ambush. The exception to _that_ was what happened to units—and their commanders—who fell in love with their own cleverness while the enemy realized that there _was_ an ambush…and set about returning the favor.

He suddenly grinned as his passive sonar picked up the enemy's slow approach.

_Step into the water, to the Surfer thought the Shark_…

In all fairness to Star Captain Dale Carns there was no reason why he should have suspected there to be battle-armor units lying in wait for him. The Inner Sphere had not displayed such units, and did not seem to have the technology to do so. Nor had they deployed a powered sneak suit such as the Mk XXI _Nighthawk_ that the SLDF had secretly deployed among some of its Blackheart units in the years before the Amaris Coup, though again, the small, highly advanced ECM burst-transmitter those suits used was likely beyond their capacity to reproduce. Indeed, the very possibility of infantry armed with such systems appeared to have come as a complete surprise to the Spheroids.

There was no reason for him to expect to face Star League-era tech. Were the opponents facing the saKhan better equipped than expected? Of course they were, as should be expected from any unit that had WarShip support and considering the dearth of such vessels in the Inner Sphere to date. But their energy weapons seemed to be limited to much the same range and power as the spheroids' energy weapons. Their missile launchers were still the heavy, bulky systems that the rest of the Inner Sphere used—admittedly they seemed to have gotten around the minimum range for LRMs that crippled most launchers in the Inner Sphere, but the Clan had been able to do that for centuries. True also, they seem to have done something distinctly unnatural with their autocannons if the reports from those Warriors who had received the honor of engaging them in battle were to be believed. The quantity of ammunition they were estimated to have expended compared to the quantity of brass discovered was grossly disproportionate.

So far the best explanation for this was either an exotic caseless weapon, or a dual-feed that returned spent casings to the magazine well. The techs seemed inclined towards the former because of the purely theoretical ease of maintenance such systems offered (mostly from the lack of need for an extractor or casing-ejection port) and the 'book' advantages of increased magazine size. Dale and the other warriors, knowing full well that the problems with such systems failed to overcome the theoretical advantages, favored the later with its added protection of not needing the brass-ejection port that was a potential weak-spot in the armoring scheme of any 'mech or combat vehicle that used autocannons (aerospace fighters did thing differently), and the additional economy of retaining shell casings for reuse.

If either—it didn't really matter which was actually the case—was the best they had it wasn't going to win them any wars.

Aside from their quantity of WarShips they had presented no surprises, and even there a visual scan of their hulls using telescopes conformed more or less to what was expected. Actually, they conformed to the specifications of their individual classes rather more than those of the Clans did. Indicative of a tech base capable of supporting and maintaining vessels, not upgrading them the way the clans had.

There was no reason at all for him to expect any kind of effective trap, but he couldn't help but feel that he had missed something. Something small but important that could change everything.

Dale Carns stopped so suddenly that the current almost pulled his mech's feet out from under him. "Yankee search! All stars go active on sonar!" One corner of his mind nodded in approval as each mech in his trinary began to beat the water with sound waves without anyone delaying to ask if he was sure. But most of his attention was riveted on the sonar display and the false-terrain image that the computer generated and splashed across his HUD. The river bed sloped down before him before flattening out at a depth of about seventy meters, and was littered with the bright glowing icons of reflected sound waves. More than a few were outlined with pale color, indicating low-intensity power signatures, but they conformed to the decoys the spheroids had scattered.

"There is nothing here, Star Captain," Mechwarrior Kristie, third point Alpha, said.

"There is a wrecked vessel to the north very nearly in the center of the shipping channel." Caits was in Star Commander Lorena's Bravo star which was covering the northern flank. More importantly, his lightweight _Mist Lynx_ was Dale's best recon asset.

"What kind of vessel?" Dale queried.

"The water-based kind," Caits said shortly. "I will need to approach it to make visual contact, though given its location I can only surmise that it sunk here some time before our arrival."

"You think the spheroids have baited us into a cowardly trap, quiaff?" Blada Neely, Charlie Star's Commander, asked.

"Major Roland did not mention his infantry units," Dale said. "I had the sudden thought that maybe they were divers with limpet charges or something similar."

"As if such could harm the likes of a battlemech," the Star Commander scoffed.

"As you say, Star Commander," Dale agreed with a pleasant tone. "But would the seals on your cockpit hatch agree with you if someone were to place a twenty-kilo directional charge on them?"

A long pause was answer enough to draw a very satisfied smirk as he turned back to the simulated representation of the bottom of the river on his HUD. Unfortunately the debris was reflecting sound waves just as easily as it did radar, and the jagged edges and irregular shapes were sending those sound waves all over the place. There were magnetic anomalies aplenty. The river current was degrading motion trackers which were already throwing up false targets on returns from everything from more of the tinsel-chaff to several good-sized logs that appeared to have escaped from a lumber barge up-river.

Seventy meters was fairly deep for a diver, even with modern dive-suits and air mixes. Captured tech suggested that was especially the case for the rebreathers that the Spheroids were capable of building, and with modern listening sensors no one would be foolish enough to use a noisy open-circuit system.

"Lorena, Blada, put an _Ice Ferret_-Prime on point," he decided. A flick of a finger brought up the Alpha Striker push. "Baltazar, front door. Kristie take wide right, I have left. Zasser, Dimon, tuck in behind us."

Perfect it was not, but it put a line of active probes out in front in a unit with useable weapons. As far as his star went, it tucked the two OmniMechs whose weapons were most hampered by the aquatic environment behind the rest.

"Memo to self," he intoned as his trinary once more began to advance, "conduct additional underwater training exercises and suggest to Star Colonel Darren Fetladral the same on a cluster level."

"Active Probe, detected."

"Thank you, Nag, tell me something I don't know." Lieutenant Smythwick told the computer that drove much of his battle armor. It was fairly obvious that the enemy hadn't yet realized that some of the 'ECM decoys' were actually passive remote sensors. Even if that was the case the emissions from the active probe sensors were easy enough to detect and were rapidly approaching detection thresholds. The support team that had accompanied the better part of the cavalry regiment to the ground had done a pretty good job of prepping the battlefield, but there hadn't been all that much time and this hadn't been the only site selected.

The sensor net was neither as wide nor as deep as he would have liked, and the variety of sensor types was limited. Likewise the active emitters that had been scattered were laid in a pattern nowhere near as dense as the Book called for, let alone the Book amended to account for the woofies tech advantage plus a really healthy margin just in case.

Still, the net was enough to give him some estimate of unit size and general location.

"Let's see," he said aloud. "Command says they like base-5 formations. That makes the two groupings of four-abreast with one ahead, each a lance covering the flanks, and the cluster in the center the third lance—probably the command lance. The guys in front have probes and are probably energy armed so they die first, that big one in the northern group has to go, and then these two back here are probably fire-support units that aren't going to be effective underwater but'll be a pisser on land..."

He checked his map at the disposition of his forces. "Nag, record the following: Sergeant Sharpe to take Corporal McLeod and his fireteam, plus Able squad, second platoon, and engage to the south. Staff Sergeant Hallston, take Bravo second, and Corporal Evens' fireteam north. Remaining units on me. On my command, all elements engage and destroy enemy point-mechs with energy fire, then divert to secondary targets."

Leland paused his recording to check the sensors again. There were definitely additional active probe units to the south. "Secondary targets. Sharpe, engage enemy recon assets. Concentrate on 'mech units similar to the point, designated _Pathfinder_. Hallston, I want that big one dead. Corporal Granger will take the southern of the two center rear-ward units, I will take the northern. Sergeant Owens will hold as tactical reserve-center. Sharpe and Hallston to designate tertiary targets and targets of opportunity for their squads. Recording ends."

He paused only a moment longer before saying. "Nag, comm, optic-line, transmit."

The fiber-optic line that had been carefully laid when this battleground had been prepped pulsed as the data packet with Leland's orders flashed out to the other suits of battle armor. It flashed again as additional orders went out from the sergeants to the corporals, and from the corporals to their lances and privates.

Dale nodded to himself as Caits reported in that the ship was an old wreck. The current was stronger down here, and it was giving Satalla's _Timberwolf,_ with its big missile racks, some trouble. Truth be told, it was giving them all trouble but the smaller mechs between their better mobility and smaller cross-sections were handling it better.

Having Caits out ahead of them was slightly troubling. Unlike any of his other warriors Caits' _Mist Lynx_ was configured as a pure ballistic/missile platform and effectively weaponless underwater. Still, it had an active probe which would provide ample warning…against anything except combat swimmers.

Caits already had his small OmniMech moving which drew an approving nod. A human could only propel himself so fast, after all. Lorena's order Caits to hook back towards the trinary formation brought another nod. There would be battle soon enough, no need for Caits to go off by himself to find it.

"Star Captain!" his comm. hissed to life, Caits' voice tense with surprise. "I'm und—"

The message disappeared in static as hydrophones brought the sound of a concussive _thud_ and air bubbles collapsing under the weight of the water above them.

"Minefield!" Lorena spat.

"Star Captain! Above us!"

A glance at his sensors, expecting to see a wide variety of one-sensor returns-contacts that registered on only one sensor and were thus easily filtered out. Instead Dale was greeted with radar-contact, sonar-contact, heat-source, movement… His weapons were already linked and he settled the crosshairs over one that was well within range and squeezed the firing levers. A pair of blue-white bolts penetrated the water as both particle projection cannons fired and the target disappeared from sensors. Somewhere nearby a concussion bomb went off, but it was small, a hand-weapon at best. Sufficient in strength to discourage, perhaps even kill, unarmored combat swimmers, but insufficient to cause any damage without direct contact, and even then what damage inflicted would be little more than cosmetic.

Radar warning receivers screamed as his 'mech was painted, something screamed in the water, making hydrophones useless. Icons representing power sources fluctuated and flickered across the HUD.

"_Stravag_," Dale swore. "Disregard ground threat, threat is above us. Engage at will. Disregard _Zellbrigen_. Forward!"

"Oh shit," Leland swore as one section of his tac-map suddenly became crystal clear as a sensor unit went active and broadcasted its 'take' down the fiber-optic cable. Somehow a 'mech with an active probe had gotten around his northern flank and nobody had spotted it until it literally stumbled across the back-side of his spread-out line.

Evens hadn't really had an option except to power up his fireteam and go active. Not if he wanted to keep them alive, and if that 'mech got off a contact report they had just lost tactical surprise and were all going to be very dead very shortly.

"Activate _Cup-trick_, activate _Mirrorbox_," he snapped as training overcame shock. "_Execute, execute. _All units go active. Hit those recon 'mechs _now_!"


	12. Chapter 11

Leland was pleased to note his men resisting the urge to ripple-fire their Smarties at the enemy _Pathfinder_. As short-ranged as the weapons were they had almost twice the range of the laser the riflemen carried, although the likelihood of hits at extreme range was decidedly iffy. A few _were_ fired, along with several lasers—the longer-ranged support weapons the heavy gunners carried—in a carefully but quickly orchestrated barraged directed by Sergeant Owens. The air-bubbles collapsing from where a PPC had flashed water to steam made a terrible sound and threw him about, but it was a comfortable, familiar jarring.

His hydrojets whined in protest at the emergency overdrive, but he tuned them out. He _had_ to close the range even if it meant risking one of his Marines loosing a jet. Piddling around at ranges where they couldn't fire back would only get all of them killed, and giving them time to figure out what they were facing would have much the same effect.

The water around him was live with the distractions wrought upon the enemy by _Cup-trick_ and _Mirrorbox_. _Mirrorbox_ included all of the electronic deceptions the Marines had prepared. The ECM burst-transmitters that the drop had scattered were only the first line in an intricate web of electronic deception that included remote ECM units deployed in and among the remote sensor packs, and command-activated power-decoys—scores of softball-sized units that produced an emission similar to the signature of a suit of battle armor that was trying to hide and failing. _Cup-trick_, in contrast, fielded more physical forms of deception. Tinsel-chaff whose metallic nature reflected radar and whose change in density created a sonar-echo (albeit a weak one) was released into the river by big dispensers located up-river. At the same time drift-decoys that were little more than a sheet of metal, an underwater flare, a small depth bomb and a weight to make the thing sink at a predictable rate, were released from _TROUT _-series drones which were little more than very stealthy autonomous cargo-haulers.

The Marines, with their _Aquahawks_ programmed with both in mind, were effectively immune to _Mirrorbox_ and were able to simply disregard any target dropping from above. The tinsel-chaff posed some problems, but even there the direct link from the remote sensors had locked them onto the enemy and so the effects were largely ignorable. The sound—which was what sonar was, after all—created by the sonar distractions, the small concussion bombs (little more than noisemakers, really), the hiss-slap/rumble of underwater energy weapon fire, was all harder to tune out, but even there the computer did a fair job of analyzing it and spitting out a neutralizing harmonic.

Then the 'mech was right in front of Leland and water boiled around him as every Marine in his two squads fired—even the grenadiers took a chance to boil away some paint with their anti-infantry lasers. Armor slagged and ran and was blasted away in heavy chunks. A laser fired back at the Marines, but by now they were at point-blank range and huge rents opened in the armor, flooding the chassis. Leland grabbed on with his battle claw, stuck the laser in a handy gash in the armor and triggered a burst. Light flashed from other holes in the armor, and something inside shattered as water was vaporized and then the bubbles collapsed, the shockwave doing as much damage as the laser itself.

He withdrew the laser. The swing-arm it was mounted on pulled the weapon dutifully out of the way until it was nestled in its hydrodynamic flaring against the spine of the suit. Leland grabbed on with an armored glove, and jammed his battleclaw into something that looked important as a heavy weapon gunner slid into place nearby. The Marine stopped nearly instantly with an expert burst of counter-thrust from her hyrdojets, stuck the barrel of the outsized laser she carried into a hole opened by another Marine, and fired. Something glowed deep inside the 'mech, a super-heated structural member, perhaps, or maybe even a partially breeched engine core.

A moment later his perch disappeared and he was blasted from the 'mech by an internal explosion that set the 'mech on its heels…and then falling backwards onto the riverbed.

"Hold, hold hold!" someone cried out.

"Report!"

"Pilot wants to surrender, LT."

"Thank you, Granger," Leland said, dropping down to hover before the cockpit next to two other suits of armor. He put the hand of the armored glove on his left hand on the glass, and whispered a command to the armor's computer to bring up the embedded microphone/speaker assembly. "Can you hear me, sir?" he asked formally.

"Aff." The reply was curt, short almost to the point of being rude, but it held an oddly formal accent.

"I am told you wish to surrender?" Leland said when the other man didn't continue.

"I am unable to effectively offer further battle."

Well if that was how he wanted to do it. He cut to the inter-squad circuit. "Who is alive but non-mission capable?"

"I am, LT. Private Morran."

"Get up here, Morran," Leland said, then cut back to the microphone/speaker. "—Private Morran will stay here and give you any directions that are needed. If he feels like you are going to do something underhanded he will detonate a shaped charge that he is going to place on your cockpit door, which will kill you. Understood?"

"Aff."

Leland nodded, satisfied that that was all he was going to get out of him. "Morran, you heard?"

"Yes, sir," came the response as a new set of armor maneuvered in next to them. Its rifle was crushed, one side of the armor was bent in, and section of plating over one of the suit hydrojets (and the UMU itself) was missing. "He picked me up and tried to squeeze, my rifle got in the way." Morran added as he removed his unspent smarty launchers and passed them out.

"Good. Everyone else, move it out."

Dale Carns snarled an oath as contact was lost with Baltazar, with the warrior not even having enough time to report being under attack. Just one moment the telltale icon that indicated his 'mech was there, and the next it was gone. It was possible that his com-system and IFF transponder had simply been damaged, but Dale doubted it. Even if that was the case, it was unlikely Baltazar would remain alive and functional for much longer.

Zasser, the senior warrior in his star, had at least figured out the 'divers'. They weren't divers at all, but gas envelopes with a remote-triggered collapse system. Suspended under the bag was a piece of metal foil, a weight to keep it more or less vertical, an underwater flare, and a small depth charge. When triggered the metal unrolled and gas was released to cause a timed descent. The metal reflected radar and sound waves, the flare was designed to provide a thermal image (albeit a poor one) of a descending diver, and the sinking of the device coupled with the effects of the river's current caused returns on motion detectors that had been tuned to their least-sensitive settings to avoid being set off by the simple flowing of water. The depth charge itself was little more than a concussion grenade.

It was this device that had made him revise his estimates of what he faced, because in an effort to hide what it was doing this '3d Cavalry' had settled on a very old technique. Instead of hiding whatever cowardly trick they had just sprung behind modern stealth and electronic warfare gear, they had chosen to disguise it by spamming his sensors with vast numbers of false targets.

It was an incredibly wasteful technique, and would no doubt have lasting consequences on the local ecosystems including the large aquaculture farms in the ocean-bay to the south. However, he admitted reluctantly, it was proving successful in achieving its purpose. Even knowing what was happening was not much of an asset, the computers of his trinary were slowly chewing through and discarding contacts but many were intermittent at best which complicated the computers' task. And then there was the concern about just what these Spheroids had gone to such lengths to hide. It was almost certainly some kind of weapon, considering how fast the _Ice Ferrets_ had abruptly gone off the tactical com-net.

"Ware, battle armor!" Star Commander Lorena snapped. "Star Captain, Warrior Cycil reports that he is engaged with four pointss of enemy battle armor equipped for aquatic combat environs. I am moving to reinforce at best speed!"

"Go!" he ordered. "Blada, action south, then hook north and flank them."

"Aff. I will detach Fredrick Tutuola to you, Star Captain. His _Adder_-alpha cannot be considered combat effective underwater," the commander of Striker Charlie responded.

Dale shoved the throttle wide open, trusting his reflexes and the slowing effect of the water to prevent spilling his 'mech to the bottom, as he drifted the crosshairs of his twin extended-range particle projection cannons across one icon in his HUD that was just a shade brighter than the others. As he did so it brightened slightly more as the DI-computer added a few extra percentage points to the likelihood that it was an actual target—

Leland swore as azure fire burned through the water from somewhere ahead of him. With the move to attack he had lost the fiber-optic hardline that connected him with the remote sensors directly and their broadcasted take was a poor substitute hampered by their own decoys. Shutting down the interference would be a snap, and with it would have come clarity, but at the cost of simplifying the enemy's targeting solutions…and a 'mech had a lot more computing power available to its weapons than a suit of battle armor. What he really wanted to do was find out how the attacks were going on his flanks, but he didn't have time for that either. And if he didn't have time to ask, the two NCOs leading the attacks certainly didn't have time to answer.

"Sergeant Owens, take your fireteam and bottom out, then decoy. Corporal Granger, we'll surface."

"Sir?"

"Surface, Granger!" Leland snapped. "They'll lose us against the surface clutter."

It was an old trick. By putting his men, and their marginally radar- and sonar-reflective armor, where the enemy would expect a reflection to come from (in this case the water/air boundary layer) he was hoping they'd be missed in the confusion. Against modern—or at least what Leland considered modern—undistracted sensors it would have been a useless gesture. But on a deliberately and massively confused battlefield against unexpected forces there might be a chance, especially with Owens staying on the bottom deliberately trying to draw their attention.

A couple of laser and PPC shots lashed out. Someone screamed as his armor was fatally breached and water began to fill the Marine's armor. Leland used the com-override to cut him out of the communication loop. It wasn't anything they hadn't heard before, but listening to a friend die from one of the secret fears they all carried could and would play evil tricks on their minds. A PPC bolt cut through the water a moment later, so close that the beam of charged particles actually disrupted his suit electronics for a moment, and when it was gone PFC Milne was too. The clerk was—had been—a short little bookish man, but he was a friend and had saved Leland's life more than once by keeping an eye on what was going on around them as Leland directed his people.

They had started to learn. Worse, they learned _fast_.

The water grew lighter, and then, despite the murk, he was able to actually _see_. Leland leveled them off just below the surface and set a slow cruise at a gentle angle to the course of the river that would compensate for the flow of water. The tac-map display that hung in his helmet so that all he had to do to see it was glance up with his left eye, grew increasingly erratic as sensors and broadcast nodes were destroyed. On the command frequency—it wasn't actually a frequency but a com-protocol that would allow him to listen in on both Sharpe and Hallston—it sounded like the initial fight on the south side had gone well but things were developing that were not so good. Hallston, in comparison, was nearly silent which meant his attack was either going as planned or had failed so utterly that there were no survivors or were otherwise unable to communicate. The status lights in his helmet were dark; the Marines had disabled their transponders before they'd even hooked into the fiber-optic network.

After what seemed like half of forever the tactical map indicated that his chosen targets were beneath him or soon would be, only instead of the expected two there were three of them.

Leland reached out and groped along his people until he found Granger's armor and pressed his helmeted head to the other. "Granger?" he asked, trusting air and metal to transmit his voice without betraying radio signals.

"Sir?" Granger asked.

"Take the north one," Leland told him. "I'll take the south. They'll have the best combat-capable units there, guiding the flanks. Then we'll stomp the center one together before breaking off."

"Per Mare, sir," he responded by way of answer, quoting the motto. _Per Mare, Per Terram, Per Astra_.

"Save your smarties," Leland continued. "We'll need them to go after those two we went over. They'll have the most effective weapons. It'll be a mad-dash to get in range, then a concentrated barrage."

"Wilco."

"Right," Leland said. "Corporal Cooley, Lance Winton," he said, repeating the helmet-touching technique. Corporal Cooley was a former clerk and unfortunately had the rank for his current job but not the experience. He was doing pretty good, but he'd only had it for the last mopping-up actions on Earth. Winton, first fireteam's lance, was helping from his side, and Sergeant Hamilton was being a bit more controlling of his second team's actions than was his usual want. Unfortunately Hamilton wasn't available. "We've got the south target, then we'll take the center one with Granger. Save your smarties, just in case. We'll start with energy weapons."

"Sir."

He took a breath to steady himself and pushed off. His hydrojets were whisper-quiet as he set off in direction of his self-assigned target. The water throbbed slightly as he passed into an underwater wake left by two of the suits zipping past him to take point, and Leland found himself profoundly glad for Winton sending someone ahead. It wasn't nearly as lonely that way.

Their target spotted them coming because it turned and twin beams of short-range lasers flashed out. Water boiled, and Leland received the unenviable experience of getting his armor 'washed' by a laser that had spent all of its strength reaching him and had nothing left to cause damage. Eleven beams of light, two of them noticeably brighter than the others, strobed in the murky water.

The tiny display hovering below Leland's right eye was lit now; an array of colored dots that indicated the health and combat capability of the troops in 'his' squad. Black, for first fireteam's unreplaced Corporal, white-rings for Hamilton and Private Morran indicated that they were out of combat though both rings were around amber-hued lights of damaged armor. Two were tiny little purple crosses that marked dead Marines, Milne and Cooley's third rifleman, a PFC named DeRosa.

A single laser beam streaked in from the north, tac-map said that 'mech was at least a hundred fifty meters out, and struck second fireteam's grenadier. He knew because the blip abruptly flashed red of near-critical damage, but then a green half-ring appeared around the upper part of the indicator light which meant his weapons had somehow managed to come through untouched. The 'mech they were facing retaliated with lasers of its own, a pair of light ones that were still sufficient to strip more than a third of the armor off an _Aquahawk_ if it hit. As if anticipating Leland's thoughts the light indicating Cooley's Lancer turned from good condition-blue to damaged-yellow.

Cooley had his squad scatter wide, which would make it harder for them to concentrate fire on a specific target but also make it harder for a near-miss to hit another Marine. Leland couldn't blame him for it, he was already down two Marines from his fireteam what with Morran detached and the third rifleman dead and now his last rifleman and his grenadier were both damaged, and the person he'd been relying on to help him was hurt as well. That didn't mean that Leland really approved of the decision, he just didn't blame the other man…but he didn't countermand him. He had enough to do with just his job, he couldn't do Cooley's as well, so the only option left was to trust the former clerk to do his job.

The 'mech began to back away, but at an angle that would allow the center-back 'mech to turn and rake them and would have the third 'mech joining in soon enough if Granger didn't deal with it. Lasers flashed both ways and the big one missed or maybe it fired at Granger's people instead. The near 'mech flashed its lasers and the indicator for Cooley's Lancer flashed orange a moment before Leland's armor was struck.

Alarms blared at Leland tasted blood but he didn't feel any pain in his chest or have any problems breathing so he dismissed it as an inconsequential cut. He felt his ears pop, but the armor-integrity indicator was still green, as was the internal pressure gauge, so Leland allowed himself a quick breath of relief before continuing his examination. The ultra-high freq sonar set was down, as were thermal-optics, LLTV, and all of his suit lights. Most of it was nothing to worry about, the UHF-sonar was useful for working in mine-fields or ice-packs or other areas with fine-work or small details that needed to be seen. The LLTV was useless because of the silt in the water and lights were a similar matter for the same reason. But the hit had carved away more than thirty-seven percent of his armor.

"Swarm him," Leland ordered. He didn't know how much armor the bastard machine had left, but anything was better than floating around playing target. Lasers flashed as they completed their recharge cycles, and Private Blatchly's indicator flashed red as that central-rear mech that was to his north came back with its laser. Cooley was reduced to himself and his heavy weapon gunner as Lance Corporal Winton and second team's grenadier both copped hits that finally reduced their integrity to nil.

"Swarm him," he repeated, snapping his laser back into its stowed position as he closed with his battleclaw.

Over the course of the Hegemony Campaign the Marine Mobile Infantry had discovered that, surprised or not, there were only a few ways for a battlemech to respond to battle armor that had swarmed over it. Having a second 'mech shoot them off was one of the more effective, though it took a good gunner to do the shooting and nerves of steel to hold still while an ally shot at you and little men in armor tried to open your mech up like a tin can. A second, more instinctive action, was very similar to a fire-fighting technique that had taught to young children by their mothers for more than a thousand years.

Leland had just set his battleclaw and the mech-jockey didn't even hesitate, just threw his entire machine forward so that it headed chest-first for the river bottom. Thick silt enveloped Leland as the 'mech dropped on him, burying him in the silt of the riverbed. On his damage display a hydrojet flashed with the barred-X of a safety fault, and a side-bar told the tale of a mud-clogged thruster port. A moment later the indicator lights for his squad flashed and then the whole panel went dark. He heard as much as felt his suit slam into something metal, but it wasn't anything too big because no harm came from it.

Then the 'mech was off of him.

Leland groped about with his arms, armored gloves sinking into the bottom of the river as easily as he had. His left arm brushed against something solid, probably the same thing he had hit a moment before, and a command tree blossomed in his helmet as the suit linked up with one of the ECM burst-transmitters they had dropped. It had used up most of its battery life, but Leland took three seconds to select another jamming protocol before using the device to lever himself out of the muck and kicked in his working thrusters.

A command-override opened the port-covers of the clogged hydrojet (automatically shut to prevent further damage), hoping the water pressure through the device would break up the clogging mud before the thruster destroyed itself from overpressure. The tac-map reoriented, and his HUD blanked for a moment before it reinitialized, complete with computer-driven targeting inputs.

His rifle snapped back into place and he fired off a shot at the mech that had just tried to bury him alive. An emerald beam answered him and a shockwave slammed into his armor with enough intensity to slap Leland's head into the side of his helmet. He tasted blood again and his ears rang, but nothing important seemed damage. His suit's computer screaming at him told Leland that the same did not hold true for his armor. On the damage display the right leg was outlined in flashing orange, and he could feel that the knee was stiffer than normal. The computer screamed again as the knee was painted red. A moment later the entire leg was frozen in place as the computer took preventative steps to keep the knee joint from sheering.

He fired again, but couldn't tell if he even hit, much less caused damage. Then there was a muffled _crack_-whumpf of a collapsing pressure chamber.

"Target down." Winton's report was delivered in a cold, precise tone. Clearly impossible, at least that he was reporting it, because he was dead. His marker had the little purple cross and everything. If it had been the suit there would have been a little black circle from no contact.

Leland set the thought aside. There would be plenty of time to find out what happened if they managed to survive, which they wouldn't at the rate they were going.

The center 'mech had moved, as was to be expected, and was now less than a hundred twenty meters away. The Marines didn't wait for orders as there _was_ only one order that could really be given. They turned in the water almost as one, and charged the enemy mech with Leland following behind, his speed reduced by the not fully-cleared hydrojet.

The range-monitor pinged and he fired at extreme range. He couldn't tell if he hit or missed, but a moment later something kicked him hard in the chest, snapping his teeth together. Leland swallowed to clear his mouth of the taste of blood and he couldn't tell if the ringing in his ears was from before or the computer again. The chest-plate of his armor haloed in yellow on the damage control panel suggested the later. His laser fired again, and on the damage control panel the lasing assembly was immediately given a yellow halo even as the weapon over-heat alarm sounded.

Leland allowed the suit to once more swing the laser back out of the way, and, finding himself slightly above the glowing green cockpit of the 'mech, jetted down to land on top of the canopy and rapped with the battleclaw to get the pilot's attention. "Lay down on the deck and shutdown!"

Instead the pilot ducked the head of his 'mech forward and used just its muscles to jump in the water since it couldn't use its jets—if it even _had_ jets, Leland wasn't sure. He swallowed as the 'mech rose beneath him, then found himself falling as he slid off the 'mech's sloped cockpit canopy.

Twin azure beams stabbed through the water above him, likely aimed at someone else, and Leland fell to the riverbed and managed to roll so that when the foot actuator came down the energy was spent all across the surface of his armor and once more he found himself stuck in the muck.

"Ramrod, Sharpe."

"Go, Sharpe," Leland said as he began to dig himself back out of the silt again.

"I'm pinned down," Sharpe said succinctly. "I don't know how they did it but they got two of my grenadiers between their recon 'mech and their initial attack, and they got all of my heavy weapon gunners in the same attack as the one that got my last grenadier. I don't have the people or weapons to force a close action, not and expect it to work. I've had to retreat. I linked up with what's left of Owens' squad, but they have their own problems. The lightest laser we've seen so far is one that'll strip off more than eighty percent of an _Aquahawk_'s armor, and all of them have at least one killing weapon."

Leland started to reply, but the concussion wave from an explosion somewhere behind him slammed between his shoulders like a kick from an angry mule. The good news was that it kicked him free of the silt. But he was sent tumbling, trained instincts focused on the instrumentation in the helmet of his battle armor rather than his abused middle ear as he tried to right himself. Luckily, the explosion had not only made him a harder target, but threw off the aim of whoever had that double PPC.

"Thought you could use some help, sir."

"Who was…Granger?" Leland asked.

"Yes sir."

"Excellent timing, Corporal," Leland said. "Status?"

"Got ours," Granger reported. "One dead, three damaged, but no injuries or required equipment lost."

Leland nodded to himself, groaned as it spiked his headache, but that and the nausea from his tumble were already fading fast as his armor pumped meds into him. "Bravo, uh, Bravo…" he stumbled over Hallston's call-number, decided that communications security wasn't all that important at this point, and tried again. "Hallston, Command, Sitrep."

"Ramrod, Hallston, clean sweep."

Leland spared a glance at the tac-map to see the friendly units of Hallston's squad-and-a-half—or at least what was left of it—still three hundred meters out. "Well done, Staff Sergeant."

"Two captures, three kills. Nine friendly KIA, four damaged or WIA. All ordnance expended," Hallston added. "One of the captures is an enemy lance leader. I'm sending my undamaged suits ahead under Evans."

"No, hold them with you. We don't have time for them to catch up," Leland told him. "All units my location. General charge, I want you to ride your hydrojets hard, I want a lot of small vector changes to screw up their targeting. We'll close, execute a full smarty bombardment as soon as the last of us is in range, close to laser range, and then break north. Grenadiers, break as soon as you've shot your smarties. Break, break. Sharpe, wait for our attack, then break north, bring Owens with you."

"Owens is dead, sir, but they still have their smarties."

"Make sure they use them, then, we're not being paid to bring back the ordnance," Leland said.

"Wilco."

"All right," Leland continued. "All units. Rally is at the subs. They have a full reload of smarties for us.

"Standby…" Azure beams pierced the water again.

"Go, Go, Go!"

He cut in full thrust, tilted the jets up briefly, then sideways, and then down and forward. He was out of tricks, out of surprises. By now they knew exactly what he'd done and would have removed all of the most obvious decoys from their targeting queues and their computers would have a much easier time identifying the real targets.

Lights blinked out on the tac-map and he wondered just how many friends he'd lost as the computer pinged that he had the range. "Lock on, standby to fire," he ordered, trusting his computer to keep track now of when the last suit would have the range. Ideally it would be a sequenced time-on-target barrage with the suits furthest away from the target firing first so that all the smarties arrived at the same time, but there hadn't been time for tha—

"_Fire!_"

The SMRTT, or Short-ranged Multi-Role Tactical Torpedo—The preferred THMC term, smarty, refers to both launcher and munitions—was one of several innovative weapons designed for the Mk XXIII-series of battle armor. It consisted of two ten-kilo projectiles, with a fifteen-kilo launcher whose mass was about evenly split between the clamps and electronics used to mount and aim the weapon, a small but fairly powerful water pump, and a single tube in which the projectiles were double stacked. Each projectile was a rocket-propelled super-cavitating torpedo with a powered range in a standard underwater environment of two-hundred meters, and a standard SRM warhead. By using a pump to propel out the first round before its rocket motor fired, the designers were able to save mass by not building a second tube, and by making the launcher assembly consumable by the second rocket motor they were able to lighten the whole thing still further.

What truly made the weapon remarkable was that between the rocket engine and out-sized fins it used to steer itself not only were they very, _very_ fast in water, but they were also capable of in-air flight. The only real down-side that kept them from being general issue to all Marine battle armor suits, and some without battle armor, was that the pump was not sufficiently powered to deliver a burst of air capable of ejecting the first rocket-torpedo.

The other thing that made it remarkable, of course, was the sheer number of them that could be carried. Grenadiers could carry eight smarties, and even command suits with their additional communications and tracking gear could manage to fit in two of the launchers. Only the heavy weapon gunners didn't have the spare mass to carry any of them, but in a full Marine fireteam equipped with _Aquahawk_ battle armor could carry nearly a score of them.

Leland heard a mechanical _click_ transmitted through the suit as the hydrodynamic nose-cap over the business end of the first tube separated. A moment later his suit jerked slightly as the first water-slug kicked the out-board tube's first smarty free. Then the double-glare that pierced the murky water as the rocket engines of both it and the second torp lit off.

There was a _ping_ as the clamps holding the ruined tube released. Leland swore, realizing his secondary armament had been set for tube-fire, not the sequenced barrage that would have sent all four torpedoes at the target more or less simultaneously. He brought up the targeting bracket again, steadied it on the huge mass of metal somewhere in front of him, and for the second time, tapped the trigger-plate with his jaw.

Shoals of diamond-dust lights sparkled on the tac-map as other Marines fired. The jinks each was making in the water grew more energetic as mobility increasing somewhat in the waked of the launchers being discarded. A handful of suits arced north away from the enemy. Each a grenadier, who, with their launchers expended, now found themselves virtually unarmed against mechs.

Leland could have brought them along, had even thought about it. It would have complicated the enemy's firing solutions, made them spread out their targeting a little more. Could have, _should_ have, he'd served with officers who would have—who _had_—done just that and hadn't blamed them for it. Actually, he had thought highly of some of them for doing it because any 'mech that targeted them wouldn't be targeting a man who could still hurt them. But now that it was his chance he found he couldn't bring himself to send his men and women against a target they couldn't effectively hurt.

So they turned away, and the mechs let them go and instead concentrated their fire on the attacking Marines who were already in effective range of the enemy energy weapons. One of the 'mechs turned impossibly fast, and even though the display used to track the status of all of his individual Marines remained stubbornly dark, he could see a trio of Marine-blue icons disappear off the tac-map, one of them a Grenadier he had just tried to spare by having break off once his smarties were depleted but had chosen to stay anyway.

The rest pressed forward, scrambling to get in range and to distract the two 'mechs long enough for Sharpe to get what was left of his and Sgt. Owens' people out.

Energy range.

One of the 'mechs was down, tripped or leg sheered or something else Leland couldn't tell, but its PPCs were still working fine. Most of his people targeted the one on its feet, a dangerous machine with a big laser as well as the two unnatural mid-sized ones that Sharpe had mentioned. More PPC fire reminded him that there was still someone out there, the other half of the vise that had caught Sharpe. Smarty fire exploded towards them, hitting both 'mechs as Sharpe withdrew.

Leland fired again, the over-heat light on his rifle flaring to life again, but this time he paid it no mind. He couldn't. He just fired, and fired, and fired again until Sharpe's people passed him.

"Last out, sir," Sharpe signaled.

"Break off, break off," he called out as his rifle flashed critical, heat-bloom overcoming even water cooling. The mounting arm still functioned, sweeping the weapon into its fairing on his back as Leland adjusted his pitch in the water to minimize drag and maximize speed. The mud-clog _finally_ fell free and the whine from his second hydrojet caused by high pressure in the thruster chamber died. The automatic weapon gunners traded a few more longer-ranged shots, but they were already past their maximum effective range and then they too broke off.

He brought up his com as he watched the enemy 'mechs mill around behind them. If they started after him he was going to tell the subs link up with their SeaSled pods and drop their mines and then make a mad dash to retreat behind them. It would screw up Major Talbot's plan, but the subs were effectively unarmed and going up 'mechs who knew what they were facing with a unit badly depleted of men and weapons would be suicide.

A/N: To address Hellfire's point about Garth Radick's reaction to Winters' threat to destroy captured JumpShips, frankly, I could have written the part better. Basically, however, his reaction comes down to three things.

First, Winters as, more or less, _attempting_ to respond to his _batchall_. He's being insulting about it, but it's more than what most of the Inner Sphere has done to this point and one doesn't blame a child for saying childish things. Winters is upfront about what he's going to defend with, and that is all that is required of him—if Garth is later surprised about what he has to face he has only himself to blame, Winters _did_ try to provide him with the 3d Cav's OrBat. My point is, to Garth's point of view Winters' is, at least initially, trying to behave in a manner befitting of a warrior.

Then comes Winters' threat to destroy any JumpShips he can't crew. This flies in pretty much everything the Clans believe in where minimizing the waste of resources is concerned. Taking something that you can use (Trial of Position=war of conquest) is one thing, destroying something someone else has so that they can't use it anymore is what the _Spheroids_ do. More disturbingly, at least to Garth, is at this point he is under the impression that Winters is just another Spheroid. Even if the Clans aren't too concerned by the loss of a JumpShip because they can make more, by now the Invasion has been going on for long enough—not to mention the first-hand accounts from a certain Star Colonel over in Alpha Galaxy and the early dispatches from her former colleagues—that he _knows_ that the Spheroids consider their destruction much the same way the Clans consider the use of nuclear weapons.

This brings up my final point. Winters basically told Garth that he'd use **nukes** to do the job. By this point even the 'degenerate Spheroids' had stopped using nukes. Yet to Garth, Winters is a Sphere who to not only be willing to use them, but use them against JumpShips. Clearly the man is insane.


	13. Chapter 12

"_Surat_," Dale Carns swore, trying to get an angle on the retreating battle suits.

"Star Captain—"

"Freebirth son of—"

There was a pause.

"I beg your pardon?" Blada Neely asked in a cold voice.

"Not you, Star Commander," Dale said testly. His mech was on its back, in a lousy position, and the range was extreme, but if he could just— The blue-white bolt was a complete surprise. A glance down confirmed that yes, he had pulled the trigger. A check on a monitor told him that not only had he fired, but he had killed one of the battle suits at extreme range.

Unfortunately, no matter how brilliant the shot was, it was not going to get his 'mech back into the battle.

"My _Adder_'s left leg has been shot away, Star Commander," he informed Blada. "Consolidate and place yourself under the command of Star Captain Ancil Radick until Cluster Command decides what to do with us."

"Neg, I shall pursue these _surats_ and—"

"If you do, Star _Commander_, I will challenge you to a Trial of Grievance once this world has been conquered," Dale informed her. "They are broken and retreating. It is imperative that the Clan knows that at least some of the Spheroids have battle armor specifically designed for aquatic environments armed with energy weapons and torpedo banks of short range, but unusual size. It must be assumed that similar armor exists for other environments. Worse, you and Ancil are the only thing standing between that 'mech battalion and the supply base and DropShips short of the final defenses at the StarPort."

"Understood, Star Captain," Blada told him.

Dale breathed a sigh of relief as the rest of his trinary, now little more than a star, turned and continued for the bank. Now if he could just come up with something to do to keep his mind occupied while he waited for the salvage rigs.

Leland Smythwick hung from a grab-bar on Swimmer Support Vessel-271 as it slowed to hover over a suit of damaged battle armor and tried not to feel sick. Of the 62 effectives he had started with, twenty-seven suits now broadcasted the omega-codes of dead Marines. Another eight failed to respond at all, and then there were those who were going to die without a lot more medical help than what one of the SSVs carried inside.

After a moment two Marines with functional gear picked up the armor and, with their UMUs whining, lifted it up to the top hatch of the SeaSled. The water was still too murky to see them, but he knew that the man in the suit was alive and unhurt but the suit was damaged. He'd ride back inside the cargo pod where his battle armor wouldn't put additional drag on the sub.

Corporal Granger was dead, along with half his fireteam in that last attack. Sharpe was the only NCO alive from his attack which had managed to kill the first recon-'mech and scratched the armor on the other three. Hallston had five effectives in his three squads, another three with various damaged systems including his own armor, and nine dead including his clerk and Sergeant Michaels.

Overall he had managed to cripple or destroy eleven 'mechs, and inflict various of degrees of damage to four others, capture six 'mech-jocks alive including the company command and one of the platoon commanders, and kill another five. In exchange he had two-thirds of his force dead, wounded, or disabled.

By almost any measure the victory was lopsided. He had destroyed nearly 450 tons of 'mechs, for a loss of 40 or so tons of armor—a final reckoning would have to wait until the techs had a look and could determine which suits could be fixed and which had to be scrapped. Until a survey of what each 'mech had been carrying in the way of ballistic and missile armaments a comparison of combat power was impossible, but it must have been many times his own. Likewise it would have been difficult to estimate the cost of each 'mech without some idea of the Woofies' economy, but he would have been very surprised if he hadn't destroyed at least six or seven times the cost of his own armor.

Or what his armor would have cost the Star League. Given the general capabilities demonstrated by the Hussars according to early mission reports, the value of each suit had become literally incalculable.

Lan—_Sergeant_ Winton, Leland had to reminded himself despite having given the man a field promotion only shortly before, was off to the north-west somewhere with SSV-113. They'd be checking out that big monster Hallston had taken down, rescue its pilot if he or she was alive, and rig the ammo magazines to explode. According to the initial survey it had a pair of large lasers, one of those long-range medium lasers, a point-defense unit, an autocannon, a pair of LRM-15 racks, ammunition, and something like four of five tons of an advanced ferro-fibrous armor slathered over its torso alone. How Hallston had managed to take it down from the front and only lose half his people was anyone's guess…and it would likely remain so. Hallston's battle-roms were destroyed, only the drug-pack had kept something of him alive not only long enough to report in, but for the medics to get their hands on him as well.

Even the handful of _Aquahawks_ that were technically 'undamaged' had been so badly shaken around that they were going to be riding back, with their Marines tuck away inside the subs.

"Command, 113."

"Go, 113," Leland said as 271 began to move again.

"Survey and recovery of _Wreckingball_ complete. No survivor. Bat-roms and ammunition samples recovered. Rigged to blow. Moving on to next sector. Spotting of SeaArrows complete."

"Understood 113, out," Leland said. Colonel Chaffe's order had come when he'd reported in, to use codenames beginning with 'W' to identify Woofie war material. The locals were using _Mad Cat_ for the same design because their targeting computers had seizures trying to identify it as a _Marauder_ and/or _Catapult_. Sooner or later it would all get straightened out, like the ones he'd identified as _Pathfinder_ were already redesignated _Watchdog_, and at least one variant was _Watchdog_-Alpha. And then there were at least _four_ different versions of the _Wranglers_, the medium-sized 'mechs that seemed to be anything from a heavy energy platform to a light fire-support unit.

His grip tightened as SSV-271 started to slow…

_So_, Dale Carns thought to himself, _they are coming back to finish us off after all_. He started to energize his weapons again…then shut them down with an irritated sigh. This part of the battle had already been decided and he was the loser. There was nothing to be gained by further battle. The most important mission left was for his people to get the information out. Blada did not need any more time than she already had to get away from these people, and if there were more waiting for her then nothing he could do would delay them.

Something landed on his 'mech and he flicked on the running lights. A suit of battle armor, unfamiliar but unmistakably human-made, was crouched on the cockpit canopy. For a moment nothing happened, then his 'mech reverberated with a metallic _clang_.

The armored figure placed something on the canopy, and a human voice rang through the space. "Airlock connected. Are you injured?"

"No," Dale admitted.

"Enter the airlock, do as you are instructed. You are our prisoner. If you attempt to harm those on board you will be held accountable per the Star League Defense Force Articles of War, and relevant protocols of the Hague, Geneva, and Ares Conventions. Do you understand?"

Clearly someone was not interested in taking chance, Dale mused.

"Enter the airlock, do as you are instructed. You are our prisoner. If you harm those on board you will be held accountable per the Articles of War. Do you understand?"

"Aff," Dale said as he unplugged his neurohelmet "I understand."

It took a bit of careful movement to get to the side hatch as he stood on what was normally the back wall of the cockpit. But he managed to get into the airlock structure to find it a rectangular accordion tube extending up with a telescoping ladder on one wall. He climbed up to a hatch which opened for him when he knocked and was greeted by a woman in an unfamiliar combat uniform with the very familiar patches of a medic.

The medic directed him to a seat and went through the familiar ritual that it seemed all medics learned, feeling for broken bones, listening for the gurgle of a punctured lung, looking for bleeding wounds that the person himself wasn't aware of, and shining a pen-light in his eyes.

"You're a little banged up but otherwise fine," the medic told him. She touched a control above him and crash padding folded out and down. The vessel was clearly designed with the possibility of being air-deployed from an aerodyne dropship in mind as the crash padding held him in the seat quite securely.

As the medic wandered down the bay to check on someone else Dale took a chance to look around. It was clean, tidy, with the slight tang of water. The crash-couches looked like an old-style, but recently built. The area in the far front of the bay held the vaguely-recognizable machines of a medical facility, though how they measured up to their counterparts in the Clans he had no idea. A number of the crash couches immediately behind the medical bay had been folded into the wall and cots folded out. People too badly injured to sit lay in each, pinned by more crash padding, though it seemed that it was as much to stop them from moving and doing themselves further injury as it was to prevent a possible attempt to seize control.

There was a subtle movement as they stopped. After a moment there was a gurgling sound followed by a mechanical whine. The airlock hatch swung open and both medics scurried through it. They came back with a woman bordering on age for a _Solhama_ unit on a cot, and draped with a cloth that prevented him from seeing how badly hurt she was. Both medics disappeared with the woman into the medical area and began to do things to her as once again the submarine began to move.


	14. Second Interlude

**Interlude 2: Knives in the Dark.**

North of swamps, east of Dantron Meander.  
The first night

First Sergeant Joseph Waarvik tucked a few likely pieces of vegetation into loops intended just for that purpose on his combat uniform. While he didn't have any real problems with the camouflage pattern, it was a 'generic' pattern suitable for anything from plains to light forests and not a 'dialed' pattern that was specifically designed to blend in with local vegetation in a specific environment. Also, it was very late—or very early depending on how you looked at it—and with the amount of light available, breaking up your outline was more important than what you were wearing…unless you were wearing something like day-glo orange, perhaps.

"_Havoc Hound_-Five," he told the ops-watch over the small com-unit built into his helmet. "Going out to inspect the lines."

In the few hours before dawn, when body rhythms were at their lowest, had been the preferred time to attack a bivouacked unit since before Xerxis was an itch in his great grand-daddy's loins. From almost the same point in time sergeants had been getting their men up and armed in anticipation of such an attack, which was why _Havoc Hound_ Troop—properly Headquarters and Headquarters Troop, 3rd Squadron, 3d Cavalry Regiment—was stood-to.

"Understood, _Hound_-five."

Waarvik was not particularly happy with where the Old Man had chosen to set up camp, nor was he pleased about the disposition. If he'd had his way the command troop would _not_ have been parked right next to a huge swamp, and would have been inside a perimeter of the attack troops. Instead the attack troops were arrayed in a semi-circle oriented to the north which left the 'impenetrable' swamp to their rear.

The only problem was the description of the swamp came from the locals, and he was worried that 'impenetrable' just meant that they had never had a reason to seriously try penetrating it. There were enough deep-root trees that rooted down in the muck and a sort of bramble-brush that grew in huge clumps on top of the slop that hovercraft would have problems. There was still that batter armor, though…

_Two prong attack_, he decided, mentally reviewing the terrain again. Mechs and battle armor—and hadn't _that_ been an unpleasant surprise—along the plain-side, and once engaged slip battle armor in the back way through the swamp.

He stopped and observed the first revetment he came across. This close to the swamp the ground was too soggy to dig real fighting positions. Instead, some dirt had been scraped away, and then more had been packed into sandbags and used to build a few fighting positions. Waarvik doubted it'd do much to stop anything that the woofies sent against them, but it had given the troops something to do and a busy private was a happy private, or, at least, a private that wasn't getting into trouble.

There was a tripod-mounted laser—a big one that required a gunner, an assistant, and a third person to watch power consumption levels—set up in this one. Two more troopers assigned to the crew kept watch. One had his rifle slung and was carefully scanning for unwelcome guests with a pair of low-light field glasses. A man could have all the high-tech sensors in the known galaxy, and without question all would fail right when he needed them most, but the Mk 1 Mod-0 eyeball would endure forever.

The second trooper keeping watch also wore his rifle slung, but he did not have a pair of field-glasses nor did he have those high-end sensors. What he did have was a thick, stubby, tube-shaped weapon that Waarvik had double feelings about.

The Pill—actually there was a long alpha-numeric designator, but the Terran Hegemony Cavalry was still staffed with soldiers, and soldiers had a habit of shortening long alpha-numerics or re-naming things whenever it suited them (which admittedly was most of the time) so they called it the Pill and were done with it—was the kind of wonder-weapon that R&D was always promising and never failed to not deliver on.

The theory was simple enough. Modern armor was too tough to make a truly man-portable tank- or mech-killing weapon feasible. The Pill sought to get around that by not piercing the armor, but rather creating a shock that would cause part of the inside of the tank or mech to break off and go ricocheting around the compartment. This would have the unpleasant effect—for both the crew and whoever was tasked with grave detail—of turning the so-called 'soft systems' (i.e. the crew) into so much Swiss cheese.

The Cavalry, and especially the Marines, had used them on a number of occasions during both the Rim and Hegemony campaigns with mixed results. The Ghosts of the Blackwatch, however, had recovered large quantities of the weapon from hidden stockpiles and had used them extensively.

Mech cockpits were too high up to get reliable hits at the necessary angle for the weapon to have its desired effect. It was, occasionally, possible to disable a mech by targeting joints. If the armor was thin enough magazine wells were vulnerable, and the magnetic drivers of gauss-rifles could at least be knocked out of alignment even if they didn't explode. Actual kills, however, were rare and usually required a large number to simply batter the mech to the ground so that one could be used on a ground-level cockpit.

Likewise the anti-spalling shields inside the heavier modern tanks were heavy enough to render the weapon useless. A heavier warhead could create the same effect, but to achieve that effect the weapon would no longer be man-portable.

But against lighter armored vehicles and hover-vehicles, the weapon had proven effective enough, if not particularly long-ranged. Now command had issued the few stocks that the Brave Rifles had in their regimental stores in the hope that it would also prove effective against battle armor.

* * *

Alpha-Second-Air-One double-checked that his com-unit was off-line before muttering a foul oath about the shortcomings, mental, moral, and genetic, about his Star Captain. Oh, there was no question that Kristina Carns was a capable enough officer, and returning to full duty after a bout with Winson's Regret was no small feat in and of itself. But her talent with barbarian tactics was more than a little off-putting and her obsession with captured books and entertainment media was well nigh scandalous. Perhaps if she had been _abtahka_ from Clan Goliath Scorpion it would have been understandable (maybe)...but she wasn't.

And then there were the new call-signs she had recently insisted on issuing. True enough giving each of the elemental points an 'element' name had shortened their report by a full word, replacing both element (to differ from the OmniMech units in the supernova) and point position. But taking them from an ancient animated show intended for children was…inane. At least the show had tried to instill some ecological morality, much the way that _Clan Spaniel_ taught Clan children about the rightness of the Clan way of life.

If, of course, one could actually stomach watching it.

At least, Jesse—as Alpha-Second-Air-One was known to his friends—was not in fifth point. Not even Star Captain Kristina Carns used fifth point's reporting sign to their faces. Especially not to Point Commander Tam Tinn's face.

He pulled himself forward a little more, wishing not for the first time that Elemental armor had armored gloves that could be used to pull one's self along rather than a battleclaw that was fine for ripping apart armor, but useless for getting a good grip on a tree root.

After a moment more of slow, careful struggle lest his movements create a splash detectable by these 'Third Cavalry' people, he stilled and then brought up a specific communication protocol. It was too risky to use radios, not before battle was joined. To give them some communication a local amphibian's vocalizations had been recorded, and then modulated to create a number of very specific but otherwise random patterns. Patterns which could be filtered out by the computers in each suit of Elemental armor and could be used for rudimentary communications.

_Buuuddd_- croaked the com, the armor transmitting the sound to his ears even better than the swamp muck transmitted it to the rest of his point and Aimee's Water point.

_R-R-Ribbit_, came the response, which his armor translated as to 'Wilco, out.'

Whispered commands caused a small hatch on the infiltration pack Jesse wore instead of the standard short-ranged missile launchers opened. A small pod on a fiber-optic tether drifted free and floated towards the surface where it deployed an optical sensor array.

Muck, muck, and more muck.

It really was not fair, Jesse decided. Another seventy-five meters or so of swamp, then another fifty or so of relatively dry land, the last including twenty meters of hill. It was not very high, maybe four or five meters at most, but it kept them out of the muck.

Something caught his eye and he used the chin controls to run the camera back.

Sentries, competent ones too from the look of things. The angle was wrong to see into the sandbagged revetments, but each had two sentries, always at least one was observing through field glasses though how effective they would be was questionable.

BattleMech reaction force? Jesse wondered. Likely not, he decided, they did not seem to have many of the machines and the Spheroids pampered their MechWarriors. Battle armor? He thought next, but likewise dismissed it. No Inner Sphere unit the Clans had encountered had used it. Indeed, many of the bondsmen that Clan Wolf had taken had been taken aback by the presence of Elementals.

Tanks, he decided. Only the Blood Spirits and Hell's Horses among the Clans regularly used armored vehicles in first-line units, and Jesse had experience fighting both. The vehicles used by the Third Cavalry were good, far better than the rest of the Inner Sphere had used to date…but over all they just were not as good as those fielded by the Clans. Many of them were fitted with the same ballistic weapons tech as their few mechs, something that had an edge in rate of fire on ultra-series weapons and used an internal spent-cartridge collection system. But they fielded at least one tank with either a very unusually suite of weapons, or had somehow managed to cram a PPC, a large-caliber autocannon, and a single-shot missile system, into the same system.

They would likely have tanks in their reaction force. Effectiveness against Elemental armor was questionable, but they were hampered by Head Hunter mission packs instead of their standard short-ranged missile racks.

A quick glance at the chronometer in his helmet told Jesse he had gotten his two points into position almost thirty minutes ahead of the assigned attack time. Time to settle in, observe, and wait.

_Budd_-_weeeiisss-eeerrr_

* * *

"Don't mind me, boys," Waarvik said as he hopped a low sandbag wall and dropped into the fighting position.

"Top?"

"Corporal Henley, what did I just say?" He couldn't see the junior NCO flush in the dark, but he knew it happened anyway. "How's the watch?" he asked.

"Quiet, Top," the Corporal said.

"Got something here, Top," spoke up the man with the low-light field glasses. "Not sure what it is."

Waarvik moved up beside the man, accepting the glasses as they were handed to him.

"About a hundred meters out, find the dead log with two limbs sticking up like a 'V', follow the log to the left. There's this thing sticking up out of the muck about five meters away. It just appeared a minute or two ago and hasn't moved since."

Waarvik found the log and followed it left, and right where the man said was something sticking up out of the muck. Something just a little too regular. "By the fern that looks like a Drac fan?" he asked, just to be sure.

"That's the one."

There was a bulge at the bottom where it disappeared into the muck, and Waarvik wasn't quite sure but it _looked_ like the…stick-thing bulged slightly at the top.

"Shit," he said, handing back the field glasses. "Good eyes…Crispain, right?"

"Yes, Top."

"Good eyes," Waarvik repeated. He thought for a moment, then turned and walked to the back of the revetment and crouched down a little.

"Top?" asked the laser-gunner.

Waarvik shook his head sharply and gestured to the trooper sitting at the power regulator controls for the laser, "Get one of the others to spell you. Not one of the observers, one of the laser crew. I need you to crawl out of here and go down the line. Tell them that the enemy has been spotted in the swamp and to get ready for an attack."

None of them moved.

"Are you ladies waiting for an engraved invitation?" he growled. "_Move!_"

They moved, rapidly, which was worth a grunt of satisfaction from the first sergeant.

"Uh, Top, are you—"

"Of course I'm sure, Henley," Waarvik said. "What Private Crispain just spotted was a periscope." He tapped the com. "_Havoc Hound_-Six, _Hound_-five."

A long pause. "Go _Hound_-Five," his boss, Captain Dustin Mang finally replied.

"Enemy forces in the swamp. Sapper/Infiltrators with rebreathers, or battle armor, most like. Hundred meters out from the wall."

"Count?"

One periscope spotted. Enemy favored units of five. How many, Joe? He asked himself. Not one, maybe two units? Three? Three, he decided. "Say fifteen battle armor, sir," Waarvik allowed. Then added, "That's an estimate, not a hard count."

"Shit," Mang said, followed by, "understood. Recommendations, First Sergeant?"

"Pass it up the line, sir," Waarvik said instantly. "All the Squadron HQs, Regimental HQ, and that of the Hussies. Do it know. They probably have a coordinated attack planned."

"I'll contact first and second troops, get them to expand coverage to our flanks, that way we can bring more people to ward the south. What about to the north?"

"We've got better sensors that way and there isn't a huge fucking swamp for them to be hiding in, sir."

"Concur," Mang said, confirming that they were thinking what the other was thinking but wanting to be sure and knowing that if anyone was going to spot something he'd missed the First Sergeant had a good chance of spotting it. "Brave Rifles, Top."

"Blood and Steel, sir."

The line cut out.

"Well at this a fine spot to be in," Waarvick muttered. "_Thunder_-Five, _Havoc Hound_-Five."

A pause, but shorter than the one it had taken the Captain to come on line.

"_Thunder_, go _Hound_."

"Sarg'nt Major," Waarvik said to the Sergeant Major of 3rd Squadron, "we have enemy forces sitting on our doorstep, estimate 15 battle armor."

"How close?"

"Hundred meters, thereabouts."

"Swamp?"

"Oh yeah," Waarvik said.

"Shit."

There was a streak of light off to his left and then an explosion threw up swamp water.

"And now they know we're here," Waarvik said mildly as he turned and crossed to the swamp-ward side of the revetment. "I'll have to find whoever shot that thing off and chew him a new asshole later. Break, break. _Havoc Hound_-five to all _Hounds_. Enemy in the swamp, hundred meters. Lasers and rifles, weapons free. Pill-crews hold your Gods'-damned fire until you have a target!"

He picked up a spare Pill that was braced against the sandbagged wall and slung it over his shoulder, then picked up a second, mentally reviewing the operations of the thing.

Each projectile was a long tube with a nose cap for aerodynamic purposes. Powerful magnets would lock onto a large enough source of metal and hold the tube perpendicular. At the same time a series of equally powerful magnets working off gauss principals would accelerate explosives down the length of the tube to impact against the armor. The compression from the rapid deceleration would trigger micro-detonators which in turn would detonate the explosives.

A dozen-or-so dark gray, humanoid _things_ came bounding out of the swamp in a long leapfrogging motion.

Waarvik lifted the tube to his shoulder, snapped down the sights. His thumb released the safety as he tracked. The tube bucking in his hands caught him by surprise, and he saw at least eight other fire-streaks track out. His caught one of the amphibian-like suits of battle armor in mid-leap. A gout of yellow-fire exploded out to the side and he swore. It was a hit, but the primary magnets hadn't locked squarely so the charge had come in at an angle. Already it was crawling itself out of the muck.

Three other suits of armor hit by the Pills went down and didn't move again, but all the rest of the weapons expended themselves harmlessly into the swamp.

The laser mount next to Waarvik fired, catching one armor suit on its breastplate. It staggered, but recovered and charged.

"_Hound-_Six, _Hound_-Five—"

"Speak," Mang cut him off.

"Need to reinforce the south end," Waarvik said. "Right now, sir."

There was an explosion off to his left and he saw a tripod-mounted laser flung into the air by the force of it.

* * *

"Freebirth," Jesse said in admiration. Elemental armor was so thick and resilient that almost from the day they were first revealed against the Nova Cats, there were very few things short of a BattleMech that could mount a weapon heavy enough to bring one down with a single hit. And now, with a deceptively simple system, the Spheroids had done just that.

As he crossed the hundred meters from his hide position to the enemy lines he wondered how the blood-named would vote on the honorability of such a weapon. _Probably vote against it_, he decided. The aerospace fighter pilots would not care, the MechWarriors would not want to make the infantry any more deadly, and the Councils all were cautious when it came to change. A weapon that effectively ignored armor to attack a warrior directly would be a very big change indeed.

Fortunately the one that struck Tisan had not landed squarely. The other Elemental was hurt, but would live. Three others could not say the same thing, but it left him to wonder who they had spotted and fired at.

Then there was no longer time to wonder.

He cleared the sandbags, his jump jets carrying him over the fighting position as he stitched the laser emplacement with a burst from his machine gun mount. A bullet whining off his armor got the spheroids another grudging nod of respect. Whoever was in command over there had clearly taken precautionary measures to keep from suffering a disastrous surprise attack. It was a level of wisdom that far too many spheroid generals had lacked. It would be interesting to watch future bidding whenever this Third Cavalry—or the other units that were suspected to still lurk in orbit—took the field of battle.

Coupled with their anti-battle armor weapon the amount of time he had to accomplish the mission objectives had just been drastically shortened. The Headhunter packs had allowed his two stars to get in close, but once they ran out of ammo they were down to their myomer muscles and battleclaws.

He gunned down one soldier and hit his jets, the back-blast knocking a second soldier off his feet. On the tactical map the fourth Elemental in his point broke off to attack the soldiers whose line they had just crossed, and thus secure their exit route. Another Elemental broke off from fourth point to do the same thing.

Spread out, keep moving, and do not stop. That was how a headhunter mission should go and Jesse was privately pleased to see it working despite the unexpectedly high level of alertness on the part of the defenders.

It was time to bring in the OmniMechs while things were confused. They had carried the Elementals through most of the swamp, though had needed to shut down far enough out that they were not spotted. It would take time for them to reach the camp, but hopefully they would arrive in time to finish off the command unit and then cover their retreat.

"Alpha-Two, Air-One, Beacon. Repeat, Beacon."

"Air-One, Alpha-Two. Beacon confirmed."

Jesse landed on top of a tracked and turreted vehicle of some kind. There was an access hatch on top of the turret that he ripped off with his battleclaw before sticking his machinegun in and hosing off a brief burst.

A terrific explosion ravaged the vehicle, sending the turret—and one Point Commander Jesse—tumbling into the air.

He kicked free of the turret and cut in his jets in time to avoid crashing into the ground, though his knees still ached with the sudden shock. A quick pause to catch his bearings was almost too long as something slammed into his back with enough force to knock him off of his feet.

Normally jumping was simply a matter of performing the motion, the armor's computer made the decision to cut in the jets. There was, however, a manual over-ride that, like most other commands, controlled from the helmet. The jump-jets sent him skittering across the ground, tearing up a deep furrow of soggy dirt, and also reducing the soldier with the missile into so much carbon.

Jesse hopped back up to his feet, gunned down two more soldiers, and hit his jets again just as a brilliant yellow-blue explosion rocked the night. _Fuel park_, he thought as he tumbled through the air, propelled by the blast-wave from the exploding hydrogen.

* * *

Ossion nudged the throttle of his _Gargoyle_-C open a little more and restrained an oath directed at the Elementals. He had never particularly cared for headhunter missions. To kill a warrior in battle was one thing, to come upon him with an OmniMech while he slept was another.

Of course, they would have had a chance to rest. That gave them a slight advantage, even when taking how they were going to be awoken from it into consideration. Supernova Second, 341st Assault Cluster, had had the headhunting mission laid on even before they had cowardly fled the field of battle. It had taken hours for them to relocate and start their approach through the swamps, and then they had needed to wait to find out where they were going to set up camp.

Frequently Ossion and Haggan had needed to stop and let the Elementals scout for them. The muck often came up past the knees of their OmniMechs, though dips up to the chest plates had not been uncommon, and Haggan had even needed to transverse a section completely submerged. There were trees with wide, deep-set roots that reminded him vaguely of mangroves that he had seen in pictures of Earth. The trunks grew close enough that the roots posed a very real tripping danger. Fortunately the leaf cover was dense enough to block orbital surveillance, but it also trapped a pocket of hot, humid air. While it was insufficient to challenge his _Gargoyle_'s heat-management system, it did cause moisture to bead on the outside of his cockpit canopy. With active sensors secured, thermals obscured by heat, and three of the low-light cameras covered by mud splashed over them by one of the Elementals when he had been forced to ferry them for a short ways, he had been not quite blind.

Fortunately stealth was no longer the objective. He and Haggan were still twenty kilometers out, further than he normally would have against Spheroids but the early afternoon engagement had made it clear that this particular band of Spheroids was well-equipped. Now Ossion flipped his sensors to 'Active'.

It would have been better if the Elementals had finished charting entry lanes for the 80-ton OmniMechs that he and Haggan were piloting. It was, after all, one of the reasons they had arrived so early. Not having those lanes added an element of risk to bringing in the OmniMechs because they would no longer have the Elementals to cut them free of the net-like root structures, or help them avoid sudden deep water holes that the muck helped mask.

That the attack had gone in early meant that surprise would be lost for the other attacks, but there was no helping that now.

"Freebirth!" he said as powerful jamming systems blotted out long-range communications. He could still hit one of the JumpShips, or even the _Artic Wolf_, with a communications laser and ask for a relay…or at least he could as soon as he got out from under the tree-cover. At least he normally could. The normal rules seemed not to apply this night, the current cloud-cover was just too dense. With his ability to communicate with higher gone, so was his chance to warn Star Captain Kristina Carns, or the saKhan.

The only real option left was to destroy their communication facilities—or at least disrupt the jamming—so that they did not get a warning off to their other command posts.

* * *

"Say that again?" Chaffee asked his Sergeant Major who had just stuck his head inside the small compartment that had just enough room for one folding camp-cot that was not quite long enough for the person who lay on top it.

"_Thunder_ reports being under attack by battle armor, Colonel," replied Regimental Sergeant Major James Breckinridge. "Now they're off-line. We have intermittent contact with _Havoc Hound_. _Ironhawk_ has a line of sight, and their captain cut loose a tank platoon—or perhaps I should say his tank platoon since he's down to only one—to go assist, but he's worried about it being a possible distraction to hit him."

"Damnit," Chaffee said, grabbing his stetson as he stumbled through the flap of fabric. He accepted a mug of hot campaign coffee, the kind brewed extra-strong by boiling the beans with a little salt and tossing in just enough cold water to make them settle to the bottom before drinking. He managed a mumbled "thanks, Jamie" and tried to sip but found the stuff just a few degrees shy of boiling. "_Ironhawk_ just can't catch a break, can they?" he asked.

Earlier that day an attack by a company-sized formation of mechs with mobile infantry—he used the Marine term for infantry with battle armor—had speared into third squadron (_Thunder_) and had driven a wedge between the main body and _Ironhawk_ troop. Their lieutenants dead, dying or critically wounded, their Captain had taken an equipment casualty in the opening engagement that destroyed his transmitter. By the time _Thunder_'s lieutenant colonel had devised a way out of the unexpected engagement, _Ironhawk_ had been utterly cut off. Only a desperate plan by one of their sergeants, and their Captain dismounting his damaged track in the middle of battle and taking over another, had gotten the rest of the battered troop through the fight.

"Get the other squadron headquarters alerted," Chaffee continued. "Steiner?"

"Already done, Colonel," Breckinridge said. "And General Steiner was moving his command post. Instead he abandoned some of his gear and left it set up and has his engineering-types using some of the ordnance we gave him to set up a little trap."

"Us?"

"Two passive sensor nets," Breckinridge said. "One thirty klicks out and the other twenty…plus the active stuff on the perimeter. Major Brown put out three patrols just to be on the safe-side. The man knows his job just fine."

"And I would have said the same thing about Colonel Eckert."

"The swamp isn't rated for being passable, sir" Breckinridge said. "There's about a million little sink-holes just waiting to swallow up a mech, plus quicksand, dusk cats, swamp fever, and what the locals call sabergators. There are those trees which should be impossible to maneuver around, and their roots will trip a mech just fine. The hover-scouts put down a triple-line of sensors, but it looks like the woofie's bat-armor came right through it without setting any of them off."

"Is there any good news, Jamie?"

"Two items," replied the NCO. "First, now we're all warned. Second, _Havoc Hound_ confirmed that the Pill works against battle armor."

* * *

Corporal Theodore McClure had been pulling maintenance on a H6X-PM_ Hexapuma_ main battle tank when the alarms sounded. There wasn't time to get the tank combat operational—it was opened up with its guts spread out all over the ad hoc work bay. With only their personal weapons, McClure had decided that this was one of those instances where discretion really was the better part of valor. His crew had hid easily enough inside of the tank, but there hadn't been room for him so he had taken to crouching next to the remote power unit.

The RPU was little more than a very powerful battery. By hooking it up to whatever they were working on, it was possible to power up various systems without bringing a fusion plant on-line.

Running halfway through the maintenance area was a natural crease in the dirt that had, naturally, collected about ten centimeters of water. The last thing McClure had done before ducking next to the RPU was to disconnect the power cables from the tank and drop them into the water. As far as traps went it wasn't much. It was, however, the best he could think of short of powering up the laser welder and asking one of the woofies to hold still while he opened the armor up like knife in an old-fashioned tin can.

It was only natural then, that when the enemy battle armor touched down McClure was so taken by surprise that he forgot about his trap. The Elemental, in turn, ignored McClure in favor of shooting the diagnostic computers, the ECM matrix that had been pulled from the tank, the field testing bench for PPCs…

Broken equipment sparked. One arc of blue-white current happened upon a puddle of solvent spilled from a shattered bottle. In moments the entire back section of the semi-portable maintenance bay was burning.

It was this that shocked McClure enough that he reached up. A heavy T-handle was thrown up, and then the Corporal's thumb smashed down on a button.

The armor stopped. It shivered briefly, electrical arcs sparked across it like something out of a bad trideo show.

Neither McClure nor Waarvik knew it, but Clan Wolf had just lost their fifth Elemental of the fight, and the fight was not yet over.

* * *

Elemental Jaffy found himself in a vehicle park filled mostly with cargo trucks. They were hardly glamorous targets, but striking at enemy logistics would hurt them almost as much as killing their commanders would. In the end it was a simple matter to go up and down the rows putting a brief burst of machinegun fire into each engine block. When he reached the water purification unit he also stopped to puncture the tanks with his battleclaw.

At the end of the last row he found something that he had not expected. A combat vehicle. A track that was long and low without a discernable turret, but the fairings along the side looked awfully familiar somehow. Without any better ideas he stitched one of the fairings with his machine gun before ripping open the after-hatch. A pistol bullet caromed off the _glacis_ of his armor, and he retaliated, the anti-personnel mount whined as he sprayed the inside of the track with fire, not being particularly careful with his aim as even missed shots would destroy equipment.

Jesse grunted in satisfaction as the jamming field died away. The ranges were too close for it to have hampered his aiming any, but the loss of communications had been more than just a little worrying.

His suit picked up on the other transponders. Six Elementals left, losing one was not as bad as projections had called for—excluding those lost in the initial assault. The OmniMechs were closing, but certainly taking their time about it.

Another transponder light went out.

* * *

Waarvik felt more than saw a giant black bird over head—at least he thought it might have been a bird, it could have been a bat—then it resolved into a suit of battle armor that touched down not twenty meters away.

It wasn't facing him, and it stopped to shoot at something or someone.

The First Sergeant managed a quick prayer that whatever had its attention _kept_ it for three seconds as he glanced back to check the back-blast area. Clear, by account that it was already a blasted ruin. Weapon to the shoulder, sights snapped out. The enemy was right in front of him, too close to miss—_swoosh_.

_BLAM_

The suit of armor collapsed to the ground.

Waarvik managed a satisfied grunt and went in search of another weapon or troopers to motivate. Both were of the same to him.

The sound of machinegun fire and explosions drew him toward the cluster of command vehicles and he paused only long enough to relieve a dead trooper of the Pill he had been carrying.

"Top! _Top!_"

"Hold up, Skaradzinski," Waarvik growled, grabbing his driver by the front of his battledress. "Give me that," he continued, jerking the troop guidon out of the corporal's hands before pressing the Pill into them.

"Top, we have to get out of here," Skaradzinski said. "The CP is gone. I think the Sergeant Major and Colonel Eckert are both dead."

"There's nowhere to retreat to, Corporal," Waarvik said coldly. "They've destroyed the main vehicle park, the fuel dump, and if you're right, the command post. They're faster than us without our vehicles."

"You want to _attack _them?"

"There can't be many left," Waarvik said grimly as he started in the direction Skaradzinski had come from. "There couldn't have been more than a dozen of them to begin with, and at least three died in the initial attack. There's probably only five or six of them left."

"'Only five or six of them' he says," he heard Skaradzinski mutter behind him, but pretended to not hear it.

* * *

Eckert's hooch was burning by the time they arrived at the CP. Not a devastating loss, to Waarvik's way of thinking. The man had the seniority for the job, and the experience and loyalty, but he had joined after the assault on Unity City and only been with the squadron for the mopping up. Even then, Waarvik had not been impressed with the officer.

Not far away, Sergeant Major Jonathan Dziewa lay cut nearly in half by machinegun fire. Next to him lay the Hegemony and Squadron Colors.

Waarvik bent to pick them up.

Behind him Skaradzinski managed a quick: "_Top!_" before a machinegun rattled and something thick and wet and heavy washed over his back.

Waarvik picked up the dropped flags and slowly stood and turned around to find one of the alien-looking suits of battle armor staring down at him. He glanced at the remains of his driver and sighed. "Aw hell, you didn't have to do that."

The armor didn't move, but a second one touched down nearby with a wash of jump jets. It started to raise its arm-mounted machinegun, but then—likely at and order from the first suit—it lowered the weapon slightly. A few seconds later a third joined it.

Waarvik sighed again, then used the spikes at the base of each flag-staff to drive all three into the ground. "All right then," he told the first suit of armor as he slowly unbuckled his sidearm and dropped it on the ground, "I reckon you won here." He drew his combat knife and regarded the first suit levelly, "but if you want these here flags, the only way is going to be over my rotting corpse."

* * *

"He can't be serious."

The disbelief in Garm's voice mirrored his own thoughts so closely that Jesse failed to call the other warrior on the contraction.

"Point Commander, you cannot be seriously considering his proposal."

"I can not?" Jesse asked coolly.

He felt rather than saw Garm stiffen. "I meant no disrespect, but—"

"Aff. I understand," Jesse cut him off. He keyed his external speakers. "Warrior of the Inner Sphere, I grant you and yours _hegira_."

"_Hegira_?" the man asked.

"You and your warriors may honorably withdraw from the field of battle without further combat or cost," Jesse said.

"Generous of you," the man said flatly. "Unfortunately things are more than a little confused over here. Your doing, I assume. Fair enough, those are the stakes. Here is my counter-offer. I tell Headquarters Troop, what is left of it, that a cease-fire is in place until sunrise. You and yours can leave by whatever route you wish. I neither can nor will make any promises or guarantees where the rest of the squadron is concerned.

"I will guarantee medical care for any that are seriously wounded and can't make it out. If you can give me a time and place, I'll see to your dead being returned to you for burial or whatever funeral practices you hold." The accent was so painfully familiar from listening to historical archives that the contractions would slip through entirely unnoticed until Jesse played back the record module later in his quarters.

"Minus their armor, of course," Jesse said dryly.

The man shrugged. "I can guarantee the people, not the gear. You can take the offer, sir, or we can start killing each other again 'cause I don't think we're going to be moving anytime soon."

"You are not seriously entertaining this, quineg?"

"Aff," Jesse said, both to the man and to Garm. "There has been enough killing for one night. There is no honor or glory to be had in slaughtering those unable to offer further effective battle." He clicked his comm. back open and addressed the man, "As you said, our mission has been accomplished. We will leave through the swamp, please inform your people. If we are fired upon we will have little choice but to kill you all."

"Understood," the man said thinly. "Give me a chance to let them know." He touched something, a communications device, Jesse thought. "_Havoc Hound_-Six, _Hound-_Five…" then, "_Hound_-Five to any _Hound_ officer."

* * *

"…any _Hound _officer."

Nothing.

"All _Hounds_, _Havoc Hound_-five. Ceasefire. Say again, ceasefire, ceasefire, ceasefire. Weapons are fucking _tight_. A ceasefire is now in effect for all _Hounds_ until dawn. Do you get me?"

There was a _very_ ragged reply, which Waarvik judged acceptable under the circumstances.

"Okay then. Be aware we have a couple of suits of battle armor crossing through our lines. Let them go. If I see one person even look at them funny I will put a bullet in that person's head. Understood?"

The response was a little less ragged and much more subdued.

Waarvik grunted and turned back to the armored figure. "Okay, sir, you can go now. If you can't recover the people in the swamp, just put a marker on them so we can do the recovery."

"Aff," came the short reply. "We go. Now."

* * *

"Oss, did you hear?"

"How could I _not_ have?" Ossion asked shortly as he repositioned the feet of his _Gargoyle_.

"We should move in to pick up the downed Elementals," Haggan said.

"Aff," Ossion agreed, only half-paying attention.

"Do you wish to enter the enemy camp to recover the Elementals that the Spheroids slew?"

"Point Commander Jesse said that it was unnecessariieeee," the response was stretched out as _something_ under the eighty-ton OmniMech gave. He stamped down on the pedals, an instinctive response to use the jump jets that his machine was not equipped with. Since where the lower exhaust ports for the jets would have been was underwater, it was a moot point as safety systems would have prevented their firing even if his _Gargoyle _had been equipped with the system. Ossion suddenly found himself falling straight-_down_ too quickly for him to grab the ejection controls.

He glanced off something that tore into the right leg. The limb flashed on the damage display that a deep rent had been gouged into its armor. Then the _Gargoyle_ slammed to a halt.

Ossion grunted as the sudden stop jammed into his back and his teeth clicked together so quickly that he tasted blood from a cut. Something in the right leg opened and the limb flooded out as more than a few shock-fractures dotted the damage-schematic.

"_Ossion_!"

"I am alive," Ossion reported. "A sinkhole, I believe. Avoid this area of swamp."

"Can you get out?"

"I do not know," Ossion said bitingly. "I am trying to ascertain that now. Depth gauge is out, and in any case I do not want to try ejecting through whatever vegetation is in this swamp. Right lower leg is compromised. Knee is locked up, hip remains functional. Cabin integrity is holding. Life support is green."

He flipped the switches for the exterior running lights and leaned forward to look up out the cockpit window. "I can see nothing. I will have to wait for daylight to see if I can judge distance to the surface."

"The cease fire will have expired by then."

"I am a MechWarrior of Clan Wolf, the greatest of all the Clans. What care I for some degenerate spheroid's promise of safe passage?" Ossion asked.


	15. Chapter 13

Disclaimer: I still don't own BattleTech

**Chapter 13**

I had a solitaire game up on a secondary monitor when a call came from _Mercy_ that it was landing two ground-to-orbit shuttles a half-dozen klicks south of my position. _Bun Bun_ beeped a moment later, throwing the decrypted results from a hyper-compressed burst transmission that had been embedded in the broadcast.

Two-thirds of enemy force engaged…destroyed. All, or at least most, fire-support assets…destroyed. Enemy commander…captured. At least one enemy sub-commander killed.

"_Shark_, standby to execute sequenced fire. _Hardhat_, I want a fire screen behind us, do not engage enemy forces. _Bun Bun_, designate river-side enemy units Bandit-Alpha and designate eastern enemy formation Bandit-Beta.

"All units, avoid, repeat, avoid Bandit-Alpha. Blow through for other side of river. Upon reaching opposite bank, _Heavy_ moves ahead and circles wide to the north to attack pursuing force's rear. _Dragon_ moves ahead and circles wide to the south with same directive as _Heavy_. _Mustang_-Two has point, _Mustang_-One has rear-guard. _Hardhat_ and _Raven_, split between _Heavy_ and _Dragon_. _Mustang_-Two, target is spaceport."

"Cowardly _surat_, I, Star Commander Blada Neely, will make you pay for your cowardly treachery. I will destroy your pitiful machines and turn their charred husks over to _dezgra_ infantry for use as target practice. I will end your corrupt free-birthed lines with such ferocity—"

It was a masterfully delivered rant, and if I'd had the time I would have listened to it, but I didn't. Instead I instructed _Bun Bun_ to record it. Neither of the enemy formations was moving so initiative was firmly mine.

"All units…execute!"

I pushed _Bun Bun_ into a trot as columns of water burst into the air from the middle of the river.

"At last! Come and face me cowardly _surats_!"

"Much regret, unable," I replied. "Your rules of engagement bar me from fighting units that are shut down because their warriors failed to monitor their heat levels."

"_What?_" she shrieked over an open channel. "I will show you, you-you—"

"Cowardly _surat_?" I asked. "I know, you've made your position on me clear."

SPLASH _Bun Bun_ announced on a monitor.

Right on cue the first of the SeaArrow missiles found its target. Each missile, like their standard and air-launched brethren, could fit a number of different targeting modules—ranging from dumb-fire to home-on-neutrino-source—and warheads that ranged from simple high-explosive shells, to what were euphemistically called 'Improved Conventional Munitions' (i.e. cluster-bombs), to a 2 kiloton tactical nuke (not that they were ever armed with the nukes of course, what with the Ares Conventions and all, but they _could_ be). If I had had my way all twenty 'mechs would have died as soon as they were within range of the launchers, since I couldn't have my way I'd traded the more effective warheads I wanted for additional missiles, and the chance to play with the woofies' minds.

The ten that targeted the combined heat/magnetic and radio signature of Bandit-Alpha were little more than flying tanks filled with a combination of benzene and polystyrene—a thick, glue-like substance that burned very well indeed.

_Bun Bun_ broke into a sprint.

I had arrayed my fastest units on the eastern side of my formation. This had the unfortunate effect of placing the smaller 'mechs from _Dragon_ and _Heavy_ companies closer to the larger enemy force. But as soon as they got the execute-command they had immediately begun collapsing the pocket, and then sprinted past the heavier units of my battalion.

"_Dagger_-prime, _Heavy_-six, Bandit-Alpha is in heat-lock."

"Understood, _Heavy_." I grinned. So Star Command Blada 'Cowardly _Surat_' Neely was stuck. How…sad. Which reminded me—

"_Bun Bun_, personal note, look up definition of '_surat_'."

Bandit-Beta was beginning to move, but whoever was in charge over there was keeping his lighter units on a firm leash instead of letting them race ahead. That didn't mean they were slow, in fact they were unpleasantly fast, but they weren't quite fast enough to force an engagement short of the water.

Which was when the second wave of missiles began to impact.

* * *

Ancil Radick bit back a curse as he ordered Star Commander Meril Ward to keep her star in check. Despite the failure of the saKhan's plan to trap this large battalion (or perhaps small regiment) of 'mechs between his and Dale Carns' trinaries, he was confident he could still triumph. The problem was that he needed to strike them with his forces concentrated. Meril Ward's Charlie Star consisted of mostly lighter and faster _Adders_ and _Ice Ferrets_, and like any good warrior she wished to attack. Were he to allow his lighter units to sweep ahead of the heavies it would give the enemy a chance to concentrate their fire on as few units as possible.

Under certain circumstances a glorious death would be attractive However, his mission was not to die but to triumph, which brought up his second problem. Confident as he was in eventual success there was the issue of how much damage his machines would incur and the possibility of his warriors' deaths. Neither was an issue that would make him hesitant in battle; however, the possibility of the saKhan refusing them the honor of being allowed to bid and fight in future battles against the degenerate forces of the Inner Sphere, was.

He would not, _could_ not, suffer the indignity of having to sit by and watch as the enfeebled _solahma_ warriors of Epsilon Galaxy were able to find more combat time pulling garrison duty than his elite trinary was while orbiting above the very thick of action.

"Artillery!"

He jerked away from the targeting display locked on an ancient _Lynx_ that was on the list of 'mechs that the Inner Sphere supposedly no longer possessed. "Who said that?" he demanded.

"Rocket Artillery, from the river, Battle-Charlie-Three."

Gerdena, then, a solid, veteran warrior from distinguished stock, but one who was only solid and not the truly outstanding warrior his genes suggested he should be.

Ancil's _Gargoyle_'s computer had already plotted impact points and flashed a warning.

"Trinary halt!" He ordered, braking his 'mech to a halt far faster than was really wise.

The projected impact points shifted as the missile-artillery adjusted for his sudden change in movement profile in a way that tube-launched artillery—at least tube-launched artillery without smart rounds—could not.

"_Stravag_," he muttered. The fire-screen did not affect the sensors required to target the enemy, but it would prove a hindrance on all units attempting to pass through it, but what choice was there? "Individual best speed. Do not engage enemy force. Objective is the river."

* * *

Well, I thought, that just bought me the river.

"Too bad you couldn't get command to release more than thermal-optical occlusion rounds and a couple of napalm," George said over the radio.

"There's that," I said. "You forgot about the training rounds."

"What color did you get?" he asked after a moment.

"Pink and light blue," I admitted. "All right, let's get across this here river and get moving."

"Boss?"

A glance told me it was a private channel.

"Yeah, Tammy?"

"Why always pink? Humiliation factor?"

"Partly," I said. "Also, something about the properties of the pink paint used in Arrow training rounds seems to degrade sensor capability and low-observability characteristics just a little bit more than the others. All in all, not only are they prettied up, but they're easier for us to hit."

"Ah?" she asked, then. "Ahhh."

The battle between more effective sensors and more effective ways of eluding them was very nearly as old as the battle between more effective weapons and more effective armor. Against most basic civilian systems the low-observability characteristics—what people still called 'stealth'—built into any basic battlemech were very effective indeed…well, aside from the mk.1 eyeball, a ten-meter tall mech is not exactly unnoticeable. Against other military systems…not so much, not without some very special dedicated systems that cut sharply into a unit's mass budget which in turn imposed restrictions on the weapons, armor, and/or other systems it could carry.

That didn't make the L/O-characteristics pointless. Battle damage knocking out sensors was only one thing that could make the basic systems suddenly useful. There was also the not-so-minor fact that a modern battlefield was a hash of electronic confusion for computers to sort through. Not only were there active sensors, but almost all of those sensors had an 'anti-sensor' jammer/blocker setting. There were 'mechs who devoted a portion of their mass to larger, dedicated E-war systems. The list was not quite endless. As a result, anything that eased the task of the computers that were trying to sort out the targets from the clutter was latched onto. This included all of those 'mechs that were not quite as 'stealthy' as their peers.

"Damn," I muttered, "They're good."

"What makes you say that?"

A glance told me that I had left the line with Tamara open. Sloppy that.

"Check your sensors," I told her. "The Marines must have spammed them with hundreds of false contacts. They pretty obviously didn't expect the Marines to be here, or to have battle armor for that matter."

"It's hard to disguise a seismic."

"That presumes that you are standing still for long enough to get an accurate seismic reading," I pointed out. "It also presumes that your opponents are actually touching the ground, which wouldn't necessarily have been the case. Water flow is intense enough to mask any pressure changes from swimming battle armor. Besides, even if you can't disguise a seismic you can spam a sensor."

_Bun Bun_ beeped at me to get my attention. The tac-map blinked and refreshed, a thick wavy line appearing on it that the icons for my lead units were starting to approach.

LEAD ELEMENTS REACHING BOUNDARY OF CAPTOR FIELD. _Bun Bun_ informed me.

* * *

"Very well," Ancil Radick said as he cut Star Commander Blada Neely's rant off short. "All Warriors, keep your eyes open for Star Commander Blada's battle armor."

What errant nonsense, he thought. If the Spheroids did have battle armor, not only would they have surely used it by now but they would not have revealed it on a planet with so little value. Nor would they have revealed their possession of such a significant weapon system in such a limited fashion. A trinary (not that the Spheroids called it that) of battle armor against a trinary of 'mechs fighting underwater?

The very idea was insane. Even Spheroids were not stupid enough to waste resources building a unit that was so incredibly limited in the terrain it could fight on, or in. Oh, if it were a 'terrain' such as space perhaps it would make some sense, but water was too constricting. It limited weapons to only lasers, sharply reduced engagement ranges, and the tiniest breach could flood out critical systems. Harjel helped, but the Spheroids lacked that particular technology as well. At greater depths even a glancing hit could spell doom as pressure crushed a 'mech like a laborer with an empty beer can.

More likely the elaborate deception had masked an underwater combat vehicle of some kind with large banks of torpedo tubes. Dangerous as a surprise, but against prepared warriors a minimal threat at best. But if it made her more willing to follow his commands until a proper Trail of Position (or Grievance) could be arranged then he would put forth the effort.

If she had been so disrespectful in the Kerensky Cluster he would have brought the battle to a halt and have settled matters there and then. To do so now would only give the Spheroids more time, and even the binary of _Naga_s left behind to cover the StarPort would have trouble against that many BattleMechs.

"Make sure to tag the locations of any downed OmniMechs, or Star Commander Blada's battle armor, for later retrieval by selvedge units," he added.

"Battle Alpha One, Charlie Three, I have been fired upon by torpedoes."

Ancil started to reply when his own OmniMech screamed a lock-warning. He shifted right, attempting to break the lock and circle on the shooter, but the direction he tried to go was directly into the current and a moment later a torpedo detonated against the left torso armor of his _Gargoyle_.

A stream of contact reports came in as his warriors informed him that they were under attack by torpedoes. They did not, however, report contact with battle armor or any other unit except for a distant OmniMech force.

"Battle armor," Blada Neely spat.

"I think not," Radick said as more torpedoes ate away at his armor. The torpedo fire was neither intense nor concentrated. If it had focused on two or perhaps three of his OmniMech the damage could well have proved disabling, but as it was… "The torpedoes are neither as fast nor as hard hitting, as your reported," he told the Star Commander. "I have had no contact reports of enemy battle armor. I suspect that these are mines. My thanks to you and Star Captain Dale Carns for thinning them."

"Mines?" she spat. "Do these look like _torpedo_ burns on my OmniMech, Star Captain? Besides," she scoffed, "whoever heard of using torpedoes as mines?"

"Is there a reason why a single-shot torpedo launcher could not be sealed and affixed with the limited amount of sensors and tracking computers necessary to target and attack an OmniMech, Star Commander?" Ancil asked, then answered before she could respond. "I did not think so. We are dealing with a particularly clever Spheroid. One that is still limited to the technology they possess, but with a better grasp of how to use it to stymie our advance. Merely this and nothing more."

* * *

I hit the beach (a thin strip of sand between river and grass) running in the best traditions of the Marine I had never been. _Dragon_ and _Heavy_ were somewhere ahead of me and to my north and south respectively, if things were going to plan. _Hardhat_ would have split up into two two-mech elements and gone with them, and _Raven_ likewise would have split.

"_Mustang_, sprint. _Bun Bun_, engage auto-run."

With balancing cues taken via my neuro-helm taking care of the chief technical problem of truly autonomous giant military robots, I didn't even need to maintain hands-on control. Of course, _Bun Bun_ was locked out of the majority of its weapon systems under almost all conditions unless I was conscious enough to depress the consent controls. The auto-run could maintain a straight line of advance without any further help from me, and could even be programmed for a long route march if trouble wasn't expected. Most importantly, it gave me time to deal with things that I couldn't while manually steering.

I reached to a bank of controls decorating the right side of the cockpit. One after another I lifted three guards and flipped the switches beneath them. The HUD projected by the neurohelm faded. The panel below the first held more switches that I flicked in the opposite direction of the first set.

A misty light filled the cockpit, and then slowly coalesced into a holographic image. A broad plain stretched out before me, across which ran eighteen battlemechs that I watched from an over-the-shoulder perspective of a bird following the war-machines. The mechs wavered, and then were replaced by avatars. Leading them was a switch-blade wielding mini-lop bunny, Tammy's lion was to the south, George's medieval knight was to the north. I took a moment to enjoy the view, even nearly a decade after first being introduced to the Augmented Reality-Enhanced System the ARES Cockpit could still produce a sense of wonder.

I pulled myself away from the show and wanted to reach out and summon displays into existence with a wave of my hand, but long hours spent working with _Bun Bun_ and a minute eye-flick caused displays to pour across the sky over the mechs. I reached up with my left hand—totally unnecessary as the system could track eye-movement, take voice commands, and if nothing else there was a small knob by my left middle finger that could drift and electronic pointer through the holo—and cupped one display.

It shimmered, the other displays pulling away slightly as I considered the display of my mission support pack. For this drop it had included a self-deploying remote weapon turret and a pair of 1-ton aerial reconnaissance drones. I selected the drone on the left. _Bun Bun_ woke it up and set up a display of its telemetry links. The trigger on my right control stick stiffened as _Bun Bun_ decided everything checked out, and I squeezed it to send the drone on its way.

I watched in the holo the brief and spectacular launch. The rocket motor dropped away and the drone wavered slightly as it disappeared behind stealth-coating and sky-blue paint before _Bun Bun_ returned it to the holo. A brief metallic _ping_ was transmitted through the metallic structure of my 'mech a moment before a graphic flashed on the MSP multi-function display that let me know that the transport rack for the drone had ejected just like it was supposed to.

"First Person perspective."

The image swam and suddenly it was no longer like I was a bird watching a heavy company of mechs pass below me. Instead it was as though I had become _Bun Bun_. I could turn my head to the left, and the perspective would change and I could literally see through the side of the cockpit. Colorful domes indicated EM sources, radar, communications systems, electronic warfare… Rings on the ground indicated effectiveness ranges of certain targets, targeting information hung by each. Mech-systems hung down the right side, heat efficiency, fuel remaining, shots remaining in _Bun Bun_'s magazines and the dozen other things I had to keep aware of. Down the left side of my vision was various intelligence profiles, the warbook, a comm.-screen (currently blank). Across the top was a compass readings and heading, direction indicators for various targets, meteorological data…

Deployment of the drone complete, I brought up the command display for the cannon in _Bun Bun_'s left chest. The barrel and chamber of the autocannon in _Bun Bun_'s right chest should have drained automatically, but I flipped through the command display using little eye-flicks. Mostly the direct-command controls were used to check for faults while running maintenance, but I used it to crack the chamber to drain any water that was stuck inside, and then took the opportunity to shuffle my feed queue slightly. Likewise I ran low-power test shots through _Bun Bun_'s energy weapons to make sure that nothing had been damaged from its submersion and that if it had I wouldn't be surprised by it at an unfortunate time.

I was doing it all with practiced eye-motion controls and the occasional sparse voice command while I practiced twiddling my thumbs—not the easiest thing to do while piloting a mech without using your hands.

The drone reported it was on station and linked up with drones deployed by _Dragon_ and _Heavy_, and suddenly I had real-time tactical data from all of my units A cluster of little icons in the upper left corner of my vision would allow me to select and information feed from one, several, or all of them, simply by looking at them.

I spoke a word and reality split, a wedge-shaped area that started over my lap and narrowed as it rose to just below the forward canopy, turned dark, and then resolved into an image of what was behind me. An eye-flick towards one of the icons (one of the drones in this case) dragged it over the quadrant of the holo, and suddenly I could see the river frothing as the first mech emerged.

"Reduce speed, _Mustang_ standard," I ordered, resting my hands once more on the primary controls. "_Bun Bun_, check my jaw switch." By using a pad to detect when I clenched my jaw, I gave myself what was effectively a hands-free trigger, which I normally used with the autocannon.

A mini-lop wielding a switchblade popped up in the lower right corner of my vision. "Jaw switch is up," it told me. "Think they can put up a fight worthy of the name?"

"No idea," I said.

It raised a hind leg to scratch behind one ear. "You know," _Bun Bun_ told me, "there just hasn't been a good killing since I skinned the last telemarketer to make a floor rug. Let this be a lesson to you, always leave a breeding population."

I wasn't sure what a telemarketer was, though I suspected from context that it was a person that grew from the same sort of slimy pond-scum that produced spammers and lawyers. I'd spent a couple of months after joining the Blackwatch trying to hunt down where whoever had programmed the DI had gotten his inspiration, but it hadn't come to anything.

"No telemarketers," I said. "Have a couple of woofies, though."

At its best speed my battalion could make just over a hundred klicks an hour—limited primarily by the big support units and the MSPs—but it required us to use all of the extra little goodies that we packed inside our 'mechs. Of course, we could have gone even faster by simply disengaging the safeties on the fusion reactors on the heavies, though it'd risk one of them losing containment of the plasma bottle in their fusion reactors.

I had toyed with the idea of trying to outrun the heavier units, if it was possible, and force the lighter ones to chase after us and engage one at a time. But I couldn't know what was still waiting for me at the starport, and the last thing I wanted to was to be facing off against another company, or even more, of mechs supported by dropships and whatever aerospace forces the woofies had left…only to find these clowns hitting me from the rear. It was why, after all, I had used the Marines to destroy the company ahead of me first.

_Mustang_-standard was barely sixty percent of my best speed (not that I could reach it until I dropped the rest of the MSP) without playing risky games with the power cores, more than slow enough for them to catch up to us, but not so slow that they caught up quickly with the head-start we already had.

In the holo before me, 'mechs appeared from the water. The drone was transmitting high-angle shots, but there were two other drones up and Andy and Erica both had remote sensor dispensers as part of their mission support packs, not to mention the sensors carried by a few troopers in _Dragon_ and _Heavy_. _Bun Bun_ took in the sensor feed from them all, crunched them, and came up with a composite image for me to watch of a trio of heavy mechs that looked sort of like a _Marauder_ with the missile pods of a _Catapult_ grafted on, and a pair of stone-faced machines that were even larger. They pulled themselves out, shook off, and immediately started accelerating.

I flicked my eyes and the perspective of the holo-image of the woofie company (now reinforced by the remnants of the one the Marines had taken out) slowly spun around. A second flick returned them to normal as light-codes that signified the mechs' velocity and heading. More light codes, domes of translucent colors, flared into existence around each that spoke of active electronic emissions.

66…74…78…84…86 Km/h

Relative closing speed of twenty klicks an hour. With the five klick or so head start I had bought myself that came to a little over fifteen minutes before they made a least-time intercept on my location. Extreme weapon range in a little over twelve and a half.

The terrain was disagreeably flat, but I found something that at least looked likely and directed my battalion towards it, then used the data-link via the drone to tell my two attached companies where I wanted them to converge. Then I dialed in the SeaArrow launchers that I had held back.

* * *

Dictionary:

ARES Cockpit: Augmented Reality-Enhanced System Cockpit. Uses holo-imagers and virtual reality gear built into the cockpit to project the battlespace surrounding an equipped mech from a variety of angles. While difficult to get used to, greatly easies manuvering and gunnery challenges. This system has not yet been produced outside of the 'mech cockpit. A secondary part, that trades intelligence between units (effectively making visible to all units on a net, what is visible to one of those units) is available to armor commanders.

MSP: Mission Support Pack. A catchall term for additional mass a 'mech can carry into battle. This can include everything from hand-carried weapons and jetisonable jump jet boosters, to extra ammunition, to recon drones and remote weapon platforms. Top 20% of a unit's speed is unavailable while equipped. Any hits to an explosive component that would detonate it, cause 1/6th of total damage to be transfered to the mech carrying it. Exp. An SRM-6 magazine with 3 loads remaining would deal 6 pts of damage to the mech.


	16. Chapter 14

**Chapter 13**

Ancil Radick's teeth were bared in a feral grin as at last he drew into weapons range of the fleeing battlemechs. There were less of them than before, possibly some had been damaged and left abandoned on the river bed and had been passed by unmarked or more probably sent ahead to attack the dropships. No matter. It would even the odds he was facing now, and make things so much simpler when he got around to hunting down the rest of their ilk.

"To the pilot of the _Marauder_," he said on an open channel as he reached down and set his telemetry beacon to broadcast so that the fleeing BattleMech-pilot knew who was addressing him, "I, Star Captain Anciel Radick of Clan Wolf, piloting a _Gargoyle_, do offer you an honorable death. Turn and face me cowardly _surat_. If you dare," he added, securing the beacon.

"Creative lot, you woofies." The communication screen was blank, but Ancil could hear the infuriating smile in the man's voice. "Always 'cowardly _surat'_ this and 'cowardly _surat_' that. Just what is a _surat_ anyway?"

"A _surat_ is a harmless, fluffy, simian-like creature kept by the laborer-caste as pets," Ancil replied coldly.

"Did you just call be a dog?" came the fast reply. "I think you did. Huh. Well I suppose if I'm a dog you're about to be my bitch. Ain't that something?"

Before Ancil could reply a warning buzzer squealed as a message flashed in cold letters INCOMING-ARROW ARTILLERY. A light code blossomed on the tactical map showing the projected point of origin near the center of the river. The _Marauder_ planted its right foot and pulled off an impossibly fast pivot turn and man-generated lightning reached out for him. One bolt missed wide right, but the other slapped across the torso of his OmniMech and he blanched as the damage display indicated that the enemy BattleMech had ripped over a ton of armor from his machine.

"Star Captain, Battle Charlie Four, we are under attack."

The analysis of the _Marauder_'s weapon fit poured across a secondary monitor. One hit from an Inner Sphere ERPPC—essentially the same weapon used by the SLDF almost three centuries before. It had been a good weapon in its day, but one that massed sixteen percent more than the Clan version and inflicted barely two-thirds the damage. The rest of the damage was chalked up to a pair of autocannon hits, probably something exotic intended to penetrate and crater armor.

He had returned fire almost as soon as he was struck and by the time the computer had finished its analysis of the damage to him it was flashing a center of mass hit on the enemy machine.

SPLASH warned the secondary monitor that had first alerted him to the artillery.

Ancil gritted his teeth against the expected shock of nearby explosions, but they didn't come. Thick concealing smoke engulfed his _Gargoyle_, and he instinctively shifted targeting to thermal. Flares and heavy fires disrupted thermal targeting. Some type of focused magnetic waves was disrupting the magnetic anomaly detector and—

"Star Captain, Bravo One, sensors have been jammed."

Seismic gear could give him direction, estimated distance, and estimated unit size. With time it could even identify individual BattleMechs or OmniMechs based on footfall patterns. But using it for targeting was always problematical at best and having artillery lay down a smoke screen, while not a tactic befitting of a warrior of Kerensky, was not a technical breach of _zellbrigen_ since it refrained from inflicting damage.

A moment later the seismic sensors reported massive disturbances—the profile said vibro-bombs—were coming from an area to his rear where no enemy could be but were sufficiently powerful to blank out the vibrations from BattleMechs moving ahead of him.

"Striker Charlie, action north. Battle Charlie, action south," he ordered as his OmniMech took another hit. "Battle Bravo on Alpha, general charge in three."

Two, one… he mentally counted.

* * *

"Stand ready, here they come," I said calmly. "_Raven_, Lights Out."

Certain systems enjoyed wide-spread popularity in the Cavalry. Among them were exotic super-charged engines, external speakers for blasting out the latest shatter-rock on parade or ancient cavalry calls in the field, and electronic warfare gear. According to the classified briefing I'd had shortly after my meeting in Colonel Chaffee's office, the PRW-13R _Prowler_ cyber-warfare mechs used by the Cyber Punks were, between the two that _Raven _had brought to the party, only eight tons short of carrying as much electronic warfare gear as was carried by all the rest of Task Force _Dagger_. Of course, not all of this tonnage was eaten up by the various transmitters and antenna arrays that did most of the actual work. There were coders, decoders and systems designed to unscramble enemy communications, there were hardware systems capable of inserting a physical tap into communication lines whether they were laser, fiber-optic or ancient copper wire. When it came to actual combat there were communication jammers, radar jammers, a system that could spew out enough electromagnetic energy that gave magnetic anomaly detection gear fits, and all the other things one would expect. And, in addition to all of the rest, there was a very capable computer suite. One capable enough that it could coordinate the actions of three dozen individual electronic warfare units, which in effect made all of our EW suites mobile secondary nodes.

Under careful management by _Raven_, Task Force _Dagger_'s radar and communications were left unaffected, and I watched as the range counter crept downwards. "Advance," I said, then "trot." They were nearing the limits of the smoke field. "_Bun Bun_ sound 'charge'."

A beat, then my mech's exterior speakers blared out the old bugle call.

Shadows appeared in the smoke, and I could see out of the corner of my eye as my people began to open fire. First with the blue-tinged lightening-strokes of long-ranged PPCs and the silver bar-streaks left by gauss rounds as they literally ripped through the air, and then with missiles and autocannons.

Targeting cues hung like deadly little Christmas lights over the enemy mechs in the holographic battlefield before me. Color-coded rings that spread across the ground, like ripples made in a pond from a dropped stone, that were centered on each mech indicated projected engagement ranges. The ARES cockpit could make any decent mech-jock a contender for the Martial Olympiad; it could make any very good mech-jock an unholy terror. The two biggest problems with it, like there were for any new command and control system, were data saturation and the ability to micro-manage.

A muttered command dropped the range-rings of my comrades, and the targeting cues from all the mechs but that of one Star Captain Ancil Radick. _Bun Bun_ would continue to monitor them, but unless one became a threat or I over-rode and specifically targeted a different 'mech, it would keep me from instinctively blasting one.

_Bun Bun_ took a pair of hits from a dash-5 class autocannon which I returned and got hits with one PPC—the left refused to establish a lock for a second time—and a couple of hits from the autocannon that caused scattered damage. A bit over forty percent of the exterior armor on _Bun Bun_'s left torso had been planed away, but _Bun Bun_ painted a lurid damage code over the enemy mech's right shoulder to indicate thinning armor.

I thumbed weapons over to the third indent, a medium/close-range preset that linked _Bun Bun_'s ERPPCs and arm-mounted medium lasers to fire as normal. A second weapon control activated the experimental traversing mechanisms in the mounts of the torso medium lasers. Unlike the other weapons they weren't hooked up to the targeting computer in _Bun Bun_'s right torso, but the traversing mechanisms gave them both forward and rearward firing arcs, albeit at reduced armor over those specific locations and the fact that they were quite useless until they had shifted around.

A targeting carat was already slaved to my right eye and linking it to the jaw trigger which would control the autocannon. As long as I was looking directly at the holo it would shoot where my eye was looking whenever I clenched my jaw, as long as where I was looking was within the cone-shaped area that the cannon could engage.

The second targeting bracket, the one for the energy weapons, flashed red and I squeezed the stick trigger at the same time as I stomped down hard on the pedals.

_Bun Bun_ rose up under me like a kick to the pants, but not before a pair of autocannon rounds took it dead center in the chest and carved out a crater in the armor directly over the engine core. A moment later _Bun Bun'_s shoulder-mounted leopard (technically the LPDS or laser point-defense system) whined, but the jump had taken the emitters out of the zone where they could effectively engage the oncoming missiles. _Bun Bun_ wobbled in mid-air as short-range missiles ate into its legs. I corrected, _Bun Bun_ stabilized, and then I fed in a bit more right jump jet to spin me around.

* * *

"Freebirth," Ancil swore as the heat in the cockpit rocketed up and the cockpit heat-exchange pumps kicked into overdrive so hard that they actually whined. Despite himself he felt a grudging respect for the other warrior. Most of the Clan saw jump jets as a gimmick, especially on heavier OmniMechs. Oh many would concede that they might have their place on light units, maybe. A few might even say that the same held true for BattleMechs destined for second-line troops who would need all the help they could get. But to put one on a heavy BattleMech? A waste. Gimmick or not this warrior had used them well, maneuvering to avoid the worst of his missile salvo and using them to spike his heat without using them as a weapon or making a cowardly physical attack.

He pivoted his OmniMech around. His _Gargoyle's_ sensor arrays were unable to fully pierce the obscuring smoke, and the sheer amount of ECM being put out was enough to compromise his non-visual sensors, but the other warrior had failed to move quite far enough away. He laid a camera over a darker patch of smoke, the silhouette identification program IDed it as the _Marauder _and his _Gargoyle_'s DI put up an augmented image on his HUD. Ancil brought up his autocannons and swore again as the targeting reticule briefly flashed a lock, then jittered and refused to lock on again. A flick brought the targeting mode over to track-on-jamming. Literally dozens of sources appeared, including some that had to be flying overhead though his sensors failed to find any sign of aerospace fighters or VTOLs.

Another flick brought targeting over to purely manual. A pair of screens below the cockpit canopy on the left and right switched on to show video-feed from the cameras that comprised the autocanons' manual targeting system, while on the HUD targeting indicators blossomed as the target and tracking gear overlaid the feed from the manual targeting system.

PPC fire flashed wide left and right, but that insufficiently-cursed autocanon chewed at the badly damaged armor over his OmniMech's right shoulder. Whether the enemy warrior had just happened upon one of the weaknesses of the _Gargoyle_—having most of the pod space located in the arms made weapon change-over fast even by OmniMech standards, but left the _Gargoyle_ subject to 'firepower kills' if the arms were shot away—or if they had received technical intelligence from some source, Ancil Radick did not, _could_ not, know, but he resolved to start using a different machine in the near future.

Targeting brackets flashed, but one missed the _Marauder_ wide and the second struck at an angle and scraped across the BattleMech's torso glacis without inflicting serious damage. The other warrior was _good_, Ancil decided grimly. Clever enough to use whatever was at hand to degrade the performance of Clan Wolf. Skilled enough to keep in the fight even with the superiority the Clan warriors still possessed. And worst of all, gifted in that one significant category that the Scientists had so far failed to introduce into the warrior's genetic make up. He was _lucky_.

Lucky enough that despite one particle projection cannon so far refusing to properly track and engage, he was within a few hits of shooting away _half_ of Ancil's firepower.

It seemed like forever as the autocannons reloaded while the Marauder just stood there. Targeting brackets finally flashed a lock, but before he could fire, a cloud of smoke and dust hid the machine and seismic sensors were able to cut through enough of the chaos to report an 87% probably of jump jets firing.

Ancil took a quick look around and fought the urge to swear again.

Mhong was trying to close the distance with a _Galahad_, but that ancient war-machine must have been considerably altered because it was very nearly as maneuverable as the _Ice Ferret_ and was turning out a gauss rifle rounds every five seconds.

Bravo Two, a warrior named Signe who had only transferred into his trinary recently, was trying to take his _Adder C_ up against a _Flashman_. The larger machine and had obviously been rebuilt with extended-range large lasers, which was keeping the _Adder_ at the extreme of its missile range. There was a gap in effective zones because the lasers looked to be Star League vintage. A nearly ninety-meter-wide zone existed in which Signe should have been able to fire and the BattleMech unable to retaliate, but the _Flashman_, like the _Galahad_, clearly had an upgraded engine and—like the _Marauder_—some fool had mounted jump jets on it.

As Ancile watched, a full flight of missiles was unleashed at the energy weapon-armed mech. Many lost lock almost immediately which was to be expected from the extreme amounts of ECM that these 'Cavalry' people were using. What few survived to impact the _Flashman_ did so more by chance than skill on the part of the Trueborn warrior.

Turning away from Signe's ill-fated attempt at glory he saw Olaf maneuvering to keep the range open against a _Longbow_. Ancil frowned, that was not proper tactics. Bravo 4 should be fighting to close the range so that he could bring his missile launchers to bear as well, not plinking around at maximum range with his extended-range PPCs hoping for hits. But then the missile hatches on the enemy _Longbow_—a distinctly odd version of that venerable mech with bulbous, over-sized missile pods—snapped open and a spray of missiles that _two Timberwolves_ would have been hard-pressed to equal flashed towards Olaf. Olaf replied with his own missiles, but, like Signe's, most went erratic almost immediately.

With a soft growl to himself, the Star Captain shoved forward the throttle, keeping his _Gargoyle_ moving more to make it a hard target than anything else as he tried to find the elusive _Marauder_ again. His fingers caressed communication controls, but his radio communications were still jammed and between the smoke, and at the very fine aerosol mist that least a few of the artillery rounds were putting up, communication lasers were ineffective.

There was a flash from ahead of him and he looked up in time to see Singe fake out the _Flashman_, close a few steps, and then fire all of his missiles. Unlike last time they failed to go erratic, and Ancil realized that the warrior must have visually dumb-fired the weapons. A useless tactic most of the time, but Singe was one of the best missile-gunners Ancil had ever seen. Not as good, perhaps, with ballistics, and only fair with energy weapons, but very good indeed with missiles.

It befitted a warrior of his skill as until only two months before Singe had been the second point in Alpha Galaxy's alpha artillery star. Unlike many in the Clans, Khan Ulric saw potential in the little used and much-derided artillery mechs and the _Nagas_ of Alpha Galaxy's artillery stars were widely regarded as the best artillery specialists in the Clans. But a brutal Trial of Position had secured Signe advancement out of the artillery star to a posting in a line star. The Khan could have made him a Star Commander of an artillery star, but it would have almost certainly provoked a Trial of Refusal, if not a Trial of Grievance, which would have almost certainly resulted in the wasteful death of the junior warrior.

Better that he be let go to advance in glory which is what Ulric had ultimately done, and Ancil had snatched up the man as quickly as possible, stigma of having served in an artillery star or no. He had assigned her to Zoll Raddick as a second point, and put the warrior in charge of overseeing the trinary's training in indirect LRM fire-support. It was a skill seldom used by Clan Warriors, but potentially invaluable in the Inner Sphere, and it was a roll that Signe had excelled at. With that one shot he knew his choice had been vindicated. Now all Singe had to do was finish the job…and then bring up her proficiency scores with energy weapons.

But even as he thought all this and watched the missiles close with their target, some kind of low-power rapid-fire energy chaingun, snapped out of a protective housing on _Flashman_'s upper right chest and burned many of the missiles from the sky. Only a handful carried through to hit.

Signe chased in after the missiles, probably intending to use the distraction to emplace a NARC beacon. The _Flashman_ seemed taken in despite the dismal failure of the missile barrage. The large lasers stayed silent. But just as the _Adder_ got into range the _Flashman_ revealed that it still possessed its original compliment of medium-range lasers, and that someone had managed to shoehorn in a 4-tube short-ranged missile launcher.

The _Adder_'s armor, already broken and shattered under the large lasers, was not up to the task of defending it from the _Flashman_'s response. Explosions bloomed from shattered plates as CASE systems dumped exploding missiles. An arm was torn off, the opposite leg snapped off just above the knee. A moment later there was a hint of blue flame, then a fireball engulfed the warmachine as the hydrogen fuel tank was breached.

He turned away, but as he did so he made a mental note. These people clearly had equipment superior to that possessed by other Spheroids. Engaging them on the bad side of a 2:1 mass ratio was likely not going to be effective for more than arranging for your ashes to be introduced to the Iron Womb nutrient broth.

* * *

I resisted the urge to swear as _Bun Bun_ ran a diagnostic and then its little rabbit avatar turned to me and said, "sorry, Dweeb-boy, the status of the autocannon is still unknown, linkage offline."

_Bun Bun_ still had armor intact between the blasted thing and the outside, nearly a ton's worth. More than half it had started with. The other side was barely a piece of tissue paper, but the targeting computer it covered was still working just fine. Go figure.

"Is it still drawing power for its feed and tracking systems?" I asked.

"Yep.".

"So the circuit breakers that should have cut it off in the case of battle damage haven't blown?"

"A-huh."

"But you aren't getting any data from it."

"You're on a roll, Dweeb-boy."

"So then what is the problem?"

UNKNOWN, LINKAGE OFFLINE.

The response came in big block letters the color of blood spread out across the holographic sky.

"Of course it is."

_Bun Bun_ didn't dignify that with an answer.

"Where, exactly, is the physical connection between you and it?" I asked.

"You can't get to it," _Bun Bun_ told me.

"Of course not, but maybe I can hit it."

_Bun Bun_ pulled up a schematic, then paged through a series of increasingly detailed blueprints. The stupid thing was right. Even if I crawled out of the command couch and got myself unstrapped, I literally could not get at the thing from the cockpit. I could, of course, get out and repair it by hand, but stopping in the middle of battle to conduct repairs was one of the more foolish things I could think of.

"Okay, waldo control, right arm."

It is a common element in tri-d cinema that a Mechwarrior could literally control his mech with his body, sort of like a macro version of what a Marine in battle armor was doing. Technically, this was even possible, _but_…

First off, a human is pretty limited compared to a mech. Consider light recon mechs routinely ran at speeds of a hundred klicks/per or more. The max a human has ever done is quite a bit less than that, and none has ever managed to keep it up for long. Second, there have been cases where a Mech-jock has had to live out of his cockpit for weeks on end. Fatigue would kill you before the enemy if you had to stand and ape out every movement, not to mention that at least half of what you'd be doing the mech's gyroscope and DI could do better and faster than you. And that doesn't begin to take into consideration what happens when you enter combat. What happens if you spill on the ground, do you get spilled all over the side of your cockpit? What if there are sudden movements that, secured into a seat, offer no trouble but could be massively disorienting if taken standing up?

Usually it's best to let the mech decide where to plant its feet, or for you to select targets and let the mech decide how the arms need to be moved to bring its weapons on-target.

That said, the ARES cockpit _does_ allow for some incredibly multi-tasking. Between the enhanced foot controls, laser eye-tracking, and voice commands a person sufficiently experience can pilot a mech in combat without using their hands. That leaves both hands free to focus on fighting the mech, albeit at a somewhat reduced maneuverability and responsiveness. But even though I could have each of _Bun Bun_'s arms (or at least the weapons mounted on each arm) slaved to a different stick, I am not actually manually controlling that arm's movements.

Still, there are situations where being able to have direct control is useful. For example, when you need to take a shot with a ballistic weapon that is beyond the weapon's 'maximum' range and thus the DI won't lock it up. Another is when you need a big metal club to hit a malfunctioning piece of equipment with.

The waldo control was sort of like a sleeve of wires and bits of metal that looked sort of like a skeleton of a human forearm. I slid my arm into it, flexed the fingers, and immediately the first two fingers stiffened a little. Just by squeezing one like I would a trigger on a laserpistol I could fire any one of the weapons mounted in _Bun Bun_'s right arm. Instead I kept my hand flat and brought it up and lightly tapped my chest twice.

_Clang. Clang_.

I checked out the data display. Nothing

I smacked myself in the chest.

_Wham_.

The damage display informed me that I'd scraped off some of the armor on its right forearm, but had otherwise avoided causing damage, and that the autocannon was…

"Oh, hey, I got my gun back," _Bun Bun_'s holographic mini-lop avatar told me as it held up a distinctly oversized handgun.

"Disengage waldo," I told _Bun Bun_, pulling my arm out of the waldo control and settling my hand back on the control stick. "Now, re-zero the PPCs."

"Do I look like a mechanic to you?"

"You're the one shotgunning PPC-bolts from the left cannon everywhere except where they are supposed to go. Either re-zero or come up with a compensation factor and program it into the targeting computer."

_Bun Bun_ didn't respond right away, finally its avatar ducked its head. "My systems took a beating in the jump. I need a full-on recalibration." It glared up at me, "I don't have time for that. We're a little busy right now if you haven't noticed."

I glared at the thing. "Override," I said, "Password is Baywatch. Dial back personality emulator fifty percent. Check drift in energy weapons and feed a compensation program into the targeting computer."

One after another the PPCs and lasers fired while the mini-lop avatar slowly hopped in place. Finally it turned to me and said: "TASK COMPLETE."

We went in search of the guy in the…_Gargoyle_, I guess he called it. I didn't have a clue what I was going to designate the thing for our warbook—the best I could think of was _Wombat_, though I doubted the Colonel would agree—but that could wait until later.

He found me first and announced his presence with an autocannon round that stripped a fifth of the remaining armor from my right leg and nearly popped _Bun Bun_'s knee actuator. I returned the favor with my particle cannons but he anticipated me and literally stepped out of the way of them only to walk into a headshot from my autocannon.

* * *

Ancil blinked and shook his head, trying to clear his vision of the bright lights and the bell-ringing sensation in his ears. The acrid smoke of burning insulation tickled his nose and he felt incredibly tipsy. He wasn't, of course. His mech's DI had recognized that its pilot was no longer sending reliable data to the gyroscope and had taken over automatically. It wouldn't balance against combat damage, but it was perfectly capable of remaining upright until he recovered, if he had time to recover.

The armor had held, but only barely, and the damage assessment graphic was clear enough that he could tell that the hit had come in at just the right angle that the seals on his cockpit had popped. If his trinary had to go back underwater he wouldn't be able to follow them. If they had been on an airless rock on the planet had a corrupted atmosphere, he'd have been dead. Environmental controls were still working, however, since fans automatically clicked on and whisked the acrid odor of burning insulation from the compartment.

He found the enemy _Marauder_ just within range of his missiles and dumb fired them along with his autocanons. The enemy mech rose in the air of a pillar of flame that the SRMs disappeared into, but he saw the mech jerk as he connect with its chest and left arm.

At the apex of the vertical jump the mech fired back. A PPC bolt crackled into the ground at his mech's feet and one medium laser scored some damage off his right torso, but the second PPC dug into the right pauldron.

The damage graphic highlighted the right arm of his _Gargoyle_ in grey. The shoulder joint had been cored, but the particle stream had fused it into a solid chunk of alloy. Instead of ejecting the arm, the DI computer elected to lock it down. Half the feed tubes for the SRM-6 pack were damaged, and while the others cross-connected between each other, it would double the full-load time. Likewise the autocannon cross-torso transfer tubes wouldn't shift rounds from left to right—the opposite still worked, and the SRMs had no cross-torso transfer tubes.

* * *

I goosed the jets on the way down, hitting the ground harder than usual but letting _Bun Bun_'s legs flex to take the impact. The rear-facing mediums had a lock and I pulled the trigger, but instead of firing _Bun Bun_'s avatar turned to me.

"MUCH REGRET, UNABLE," it said tonelessly, and demonstrated one of the things that I didn't care for in the new DIs that our mechs had. Someone had decided that programming in attitudes to make the 'personalities' more real was a good idea.

"Dial up personality emulator, 75 percent of max," I said.

"You _are_ aware how much I dislike that?" it asked me.

"Later," I said. "Body lasers."

"The mission support pack is still in the way of one laser. Currently the lasers are in linked firing mode. Since one had a safety block it affected both of them," _Bun Bun_ told me.

I'd forgotten about the pack which explained the heavy landing. "Flip around the blocked one," I told it and hit the jets again to clear the range. "Give me an over-view of fights between near-equal massed units."

Little holographic mechs appeared to float in the cockpit before me. I recognized the _Longbow_ piloted by Charles Martin—the commander of the fires section of the support lance—facing off against one of the _Catapult/Marauder_ hybrids that had been dubbed _Wreckingball_, but instead of its extra-long range lasers (how the heck anyone got a laser to do three-quarters of a klick I really wanted to know) and missile pods, it had a pair of the heavy ERPPCs that the woofies had and—according to the sidebar—a trio of linked streak SRM 2-packs in one side torso, and a trio of pulse lasers in the other.

Chuck was keeping the woofie at range with his 'death blossom' missile pods. The worst of the particle guns he was avoiding by using his mech's speed to evade the woofie. It was a pretty even match up, but sooner or later the woofie was going to get enough hits and Chuck would go down (or possibly blow up), or the woofie was going to get a little too close and the death blossom pods (each packed in an Artemis-linked LRM-20 and LRM-15 launcher) would rip him apart. The problem with that was the woofie's _Wreckingball_ probably had a lot better armor than Chuck's _Longbow_.

The other two battles going on before me were also against _Wreckingballs_, both of the _Alpha_—or standard—variant.

_Mustang_-Two-Three, Percy Whitman's _Black Knight_ was definitely out-classed. The _Wreckingball_'s lasers and missiles outranged anything he had, and the mech put out enough firepower that with its speed it was capable of staying out of Percy's range. Only the LPDS, which was proving itself even more effective at taking out woofie missiles than it had the Rimmers', and the targeting computer that was concentrating his shots, was keeping Percy in the losing fight.

Lieutenant Ivania Chomskya, _Mustang_-Three-One, was facing off against the other, and she was _almost_ as out-classed as Percy was. Her LRM battery was a quarter that of the _Wreckingball_'s, but at least her gauss rifle kept got her within spitting distance of the woofie's energy battery. Unlike Percy the double light ER PPC mount was set to rapid fire and alternating shots.

Against the Rimmers the weapon had been little more than a curiosity, a little more heat and bulk for saving a ton of mass and no extra damage. But the woofies were so fast that being able to take more shots to lessen the offensive penalty in the increased number of misses, was starting to look like a key component in successfully engaging them. True enough there was going to be a penalty in the amount of damage done per hit, but even if it only evened out…

Unfortunately it didn't look like things were going to break even for her this time.

"Behind you," _Bun Bun_ said as it flipped the holo-display back to primary/combat.

I didn't wait for the image to finish reforming. I stomped down hard on the pedals, kicked the left to twist me to the right. The move had brought me clear of the autocannons and ECM sucked off half the missiles sent my way, but the move also blocked _Bun Bun_'s LPDS and rest peppered _Bun Bun_'s torso, left arm, and legs.

"Heading and range markers, _Wreckingballs_, save for the one engaging _Long Rifle_."

A pair of carats appeared, each indicating a direction and, based on color and shade, distance.

I began to retreat towards an area between them. _Bun Bun_ would lockout weapons and prevent me from accidentally hitting one of the other mechs, but maybe if the other side wasn't as careful.

"A little music, please," I said, firing one PPC, then the other, more to keep him honest than to try and actually hit him. "External speakers, on my mark, _Blue Bonnets o'er the Border, _traditional pipes. All other mechs, _She Wore a Yellow Ribbon_, cavalry brasses."

"_All the Blue Bonnets Over the Border_ is restricted."

"Override," I told _Bun Bun_. Pipes weren't a tradition of the Brave Rifles, but I had grown attached to them and being a former member of the Black Watch did have some benefits.

* * *

Ancil grinned fiercely as the _Marauder_ began to fall back. Its fire had slackened somewhat and the other warrior was no longer being as aggressive. It remained a deadly opponent, but one that he was slowly beating. The enemy ECM was still proving hellishly effective, but the smoke had begun to clear and the thermal rounds were beginning to die out.

He glanced at the engagement clock and briefly considered this before deciding, correctly, that given how the '3d Cavalry' had used it for cover they probably had a variety of munitions with different intensities and burn-times.

Military brasses playing a lively tune poured from speakers built into the other machines, behind which was a familiar tune played by bagpipes.

He frowned slightly. There were very few units that went into battle with music. Occasionally a trinary in gamma galaxy would play the regimental march of their star captain's Remembrance unit, but this was… He manipulated a control on top of his right stick with his thumb to bring up a command prompt. "Intel, isolate pipes and identify."

There was a beat, then the computer responded. "_All the Blue Bonnets are o'er the Border_."

He frowned…then blanched a moment before the computer added: "Regimental March, Royal Black Watch Regiment."

That march was occasionally played in sibkos (which was where he had heard it), or in personal quarters or other restricted environments, but there was only _one_ place in all of the Clans where it was ever played openly. Inside _McKenna's Pride_ in orbit above Strena Mechty, during the changing of the guard forces.

He shoved the throttle wide open almost without realizing it. A downed mech was in his path and he shoved the pedals to get his _Gargoyle_ to physically jump off the ground hard enough to hop over it. The jump spared his thinning torso armor as PPC bolts ate into his upper legs.

Armor splintered and shattered under the barrage, but the myomer musculature was untouched. Magazine indicators for his autocannons flashed yellow as he retaliated, indicating that he was down to a dozen rounds in each. Not even two-thirds of what he had started with. He had more missiles remaining, but the _Marauder_ pilot had proven himself adept at staying out of missile range.

Abruptly the radio-jamming cleared though targeting systems and sensors remained disrupted.

* * *

I bit off a curse as a laser dug into the armor over _Bun Bun_'s metaphorical left kidney, the reversible medium laser. It was the kind of hit I had half-hoped that suddenly playing music would generate, and I had hoped that by playing different music I'd make myself a target rather than one of my people. A second laser destroyed the second recon drone, missing the remote deployable weapon turret by less than twenty centimeters, but caused no more damage. _Bun Bun_ ejected the shattered remnants of the drone automatically, then stomped on the wreckage with a foot. I had half-hoped to be attacked by choosing a different tune for _Bun Bun_ to play. What I had not expected was a pair of hits from well-outside medium laser range to come in and burn away nearly a half-ton of armor.

Under my direction _Bun Bun_ wheeled to interpose its right flank. "Cease com-jamming. Open channel in the clear, authenticate to all units," I rapped out. "_Pandora, Pandora_, _Dagger_-Six has been fired upon by two woofies. All _Dagger_ units, ROE Zeta no longer in effect. Say again, _Pandora_.

"Star Captain Ancil Radick, you broke your rules," I continued. "Now you play by ours.

"Cut-transmission. Resume jamming."

"…_Pandora_, _Dagger_—"

* * *

"Who violated _zellbrigen_?" Ancil Radick demanded. He did no doubt that one of his warriors had. He himself, after all, had come very close to losing what little armor he had left over his engines because he had had the same reaction to the music. Now, with a moment to actually think, he doubted that the very clever man had known about the intensely personal insult and had instead simply chosen the second tune because of how different it was from what the other mechs were playing. Clearly he had wanted to make himself a distinct target and draw one of his warriors into violating _zellbrigen_. If he had chosen almost any other tune the attempt would have failed. But he hadn't.

"Who viol—"

"Star Captain Ancil Radick," a cold voice addressing him personally cut him off. "You broke your rules," it continued. "Now you play by ours."

* * *

Captain Hans Dietrich who endured the handle of 'Goose Killer'—earned for his first and only hunting trip where he had made the bag limit in the first half-hour—with long-suffering patience, had been waiting far closer to the action than was his usual preference almost from the moment Charles Martin had faced off against one of the woofie _Wreckingball_s. The heavily modified _Longbows_ were weak on armor—in fact each carried only a single ton more than his _Rifleman_ despite being twenty-five tons heavier—and had even less business being engaged in close combat than he did.

But Charles was one of _his_, so Hans had steadily moved closer to 'observe' and the woofie had let him. It was foolish, very foolish. Because the same rotary autocannon mount that made the _Zeus_ an awesome aerospace fighter-killer, was the primary weapon his _Rifleman_ carried. It had originally been intended as an anti-aircraft weapon and the ammunition it used was unique to the weapon that fired it, but someone had realized that inevitably a _Rifleman_ mech was much more likely to end up having to face off against another ground-bound target. And so, unlike the _Zeus_es, the Goose Killer had a full ton of the very rare 'standard' ammunition available to him.

The electric motor assemblies that turned the barrels had already sped the weapons up to full. When the _Pandora_ call came, Hans merely had to drift his crosshairs onto the mech's back, link in the extended-range laser battery, and pull the trigger.

Heat spiked, the roar of the guns was only partially dampened and the recoil shook the mech like always. In less than two seconds the ammunition indicator for the solitary 'standard' ammunition bin had gone from green to yellow to orange as he burned through two-thirds of a ton in about half of an eye-blink.

The woofie's back might as well have been unarmored. An explosion ripped through one side as an autocannon round found the missile magazine, but it was more show than force as the CASE directed the explosion away from the pilot and engine. The left particle projection cannon had its magnetic confinement coils, normally used to concentrate and direct the particle stream, turned into so much scrap. A laser dug into the bank of medium pulse lasers and savaged them even as a yellow-orange-red flower bloomed on Hans' thermal display as at least one hit went home in the engine.

The woofie somehow managed to keep the badly damaged machine on its feet and Hans backed off slightly. Heat management was a problem that had eternally plagued the _Rifleman_, and while his wasn't as bad about it as some models, the woofie was still going to get one free shot before his systems cooled enough to repeat the attack.

But the woofie didn't turn and face him. Instead its pilot threw the 75-ton war-machine into a staggering head-long charge at Chuck's _Longbow_ with its single functional PPC leading.

* * *

Erica Moez had been waiting in line with ill-held patience while her lance leader engaged one of the _Wreckingball-Alpha_s. When the Cavalry normally deployed companies it was in three platoon/lances of four, plus a two-unit command element. It gave them a little extra firepower, but its main purpose was to allow the company commander to spend more time directing her lances. The main purpose of the _second_ mech was, officially, to assist in providing fire-support with the company commander. Unofficially it was to get between the boss and danger.

As far as bosses and friends went, Ivania was near the top, and it irked Erica that all she could do was sit and watch because the battalion had reduced companies to the lance level. That hadn't stopped her from placing her _Galahad_ at her friend's otherwise unprotected back.

When the _Pandora_ signal came her gauss rifles were already set to alternating fire, and when Ivania dodged her _Orion_ to the left Erica kicked her mech into a sprint.

The _Wreckingball_ took a step back, turning to keep them both in sight, then split its fire.

_Fool_, Erica thought, neither knowing nor caring why the enemy had split his fire. ECM sucked off eight missiles, and the LPDS destroyed half of those that remained. A half-dozen survived to pepper her mech. The _Wreckingball_'s laser was another matter and it blasted a deep gouge in the glacis of her left torso.

But then it was her turn. A ferrous-nickel slug ripped through the air and impacted squarely on the mech's left missile pod. Three steps later a second slug of inert metal slammed into its chest.

It turned to face her when Ivania reminded their opponent that _she_ had a gauss rifle too, and an LRM launcher, and the light PPCs…

* * *

To the north of where _Mustang_ was engaged with Battle Alpha and Bravo stars, Blada Neely smiled a tooth-flashing grin that was not at all pleasant as her extended-range large laser caught a _Hermes_ in the left knee and sent it crashing to the ground. It had relied solely on close-in weapons, a quartet of ancient medium lasers and a short-range missile rack that was surprisingly powerful for a mech its size.

She paced slowly around it as it struggled to get up. Her shot had not managed to take off the leg but it had clearly inflicted damage, perhaps critical damage, to the knee actuator.

With a negligent flick of a finger she brought the laser up in manual, locking onto the inferior BattleMech's cockpit. The pilot had proved himself a moderate challenge, using his machine's speed—impossibly fast at half again her own—to avoid her weapons. But it had been the panicked actions of a _surat_ knowing that a wolf was hunting it rather than the actions of a True Warrior.

Part of Blada regretted giving him an honorable death. The larger part of her was already contemplating the addition to her codex that concerned capture of technology the Clan did not posses. Only the recently developed super-extra-light engines could come close to fitting in a machine that size and supply enough power, but even they weighed too much for it to also carry such a heavy array of weapons and armor.

An alarm screamed as missiles flew at her.

Blada flicked a switch and her laser cored the _Hermes_' cockpit as she turned to find a _Firefly_ screaming towards her at nearly the same speed as the _Hermes_ she had just taken out.

With little thought about it she shoved the throttle open wide. The sudden change in speed and the rapid closing velocity threw off many of the missiles, and Blada had barely enough time to ripple off her own short-range missile racks. Lasers staggered her _Adder_, but then both machines were past each other.

A long-range duel, she decided. Her missiles were superior to the Spheroid's lasers close-in. He had the speed to dictate the engagement, but her laser had better range than his missiles. He would have to close the range if he wanted to use his missiles, and when he did he would enter her range as well.

* * *

MechWarrior Garvy, who had become Striker Charlie's Third Point after the loss of MechWarriors Bovvin and Fredrick Tutuola, had enjoyed his Star Commander's success with his first victory—an ably piloted _Shadow Hawk_ whose weapon fit was more focused on medium-range combat—but it had gone downhill from there.

He had turned his PPC-armed _Adder_ in the direction of a _Phoenix Hawk_, but a _Crab_ had interposed itself. A competent BattleMech when first designed, though one with a rather sharp heat curve. But someone had refitted this one so that it was two-thirds again as fast as he was, armed with Star League-vintage extended-range PPCs that had the same range (though were somewhat less potent) as his own weapons, and given the thing jump jets.

A _lot_ of jump jets.

It was unable to out-_fly_ him by only the thinnest of margins, and if any more had been equipped it might as well have been a bird.

As it was not only was he unable to hit the enemy BattleMech, he had a sinking feeling that its pilot was thinking like a smoke jaguar—a real one, not one of genetically-deficient human variety—playing with a _surat_.

* * *

Steven Pierce nodded a salute that his opponent couldn't see as the other mech feinted right-left-right, but instead of going left like Pierce had anticipated, continued to the right. It was a beautiful move for a less-nimble machine that not only sucked off Pierce's shots, but left him open to the retaliatory attack.

Blue-white lightning played across the left arm of his _Sentinel_, ripping away what little armor was left and taking out a portion of the experimental defensive laser array that had never worked quite right in the first place.

Steve circled right, twisting his mech at the waist to help shield the armorless limb. "_Tonto_," he told his mech's DI as the other mech began to feint again, "Cluster munitions, rapid fire both guns. Bracketing barrage…"

* * *

Eligio gave his opponent a grudging nod of respect as he circled away while rotating his _Sentinel_'s torso to draw the damaged arm out of the line of fire and also bringing the second autocannon to bear. He started to feint left, in the same direction the BattleMech was moving, only for a barrage of cluster munitions to explode around him.

The damage was minimal, too spread out across the armor of his _Ice Ferret_ to be serious, and his first reaction was that they had finally done what all Spheroids did and disregarded _zellbrigen_. But then the analysis of the shot pattern came back and his second reaction was a flat _impossible_.

The other machine had clearly been armed with at least a pair of advanced ultra-class autocannons, perhaps as many as three, because it had been rippling off four- and occasional six-round barrages without apparent concern that the weapons might jam or the profligate expenditure of ammunition. And now, somehow, it had either also managed to fit a quartet of LB-X-series autocannons, or someone had developed a way for an ultra-series autocannon to fire cluster munitions.

Scientists from all of the Clans had spent more than two _centuries_ trying to come up with a way of doing just that and so far all they had managed to do was fail.

The former Cloud Cobra brushed a gloved hand over his combat suit, over the place where he still wore his cross.

_They have _Tao. The thought came unbidden and he started to shy away from it, but it was not The Way of a warrior to avoid confrontation. With the sudden clarity of vision that had brought the thought, he started to reevaluate the situation when the jamming of their comms stopped. A tick later the DI identified a signal broadcasted in the clear and piped it into his cockpit.

"…_dora, Pandora_. _Dagger_-Six has been fired upon…"

* * *

***** INCOMING TRANSMISSION **  
**

***** CLASSIFIED- -TOP SECRET ***  
******* EYES ONLY- -PRIMUS ***  
**

**Radio callsigns of Task Force Dagger**

**Dagger**—radio callsign for Task Force Dagger, Roland Talbot's combined unit  
**Mustang**—Radio callsign of Roland Talbot's personal command, a mech battalion (reduced to currently a reinforced company) attached to the 3d Cavalry  
**Mustang-One**—Roland's command lance  
**Mustang-Two**—Mustang's 2nd lance  
**Camelot**—Mustang-Two's unofficial callsign, originates as a play on names of assigned personnel, and from being exclusively equipped with BattleMechs with designations from Arthurian-myths.  
**Mustang-Three**—Mustang's 3rd lance, Ivania Chomskya commanding  
**Mustang-Four**—official radio callsign of Mustang's outsized fire-support lance. In practice, seldom used in favor of 'Shotgun' or 'Long-Rifle'  
**Shotgun**—radio callsign of Mustang's element of _Riflemen_ air-defense mechs, Hans Dietrich commands both Mustang-Four and 'Shotgun' element.  
**Long-Rifle**—radio callsign of Mustang's LRM support mechs (2 _Longbows_, 2 _Archers_), Charles Martin commanding  
**Dragon**—radio callsign of 'D' Company, 1st Squadron, 3d Cavalry, attached to TF Dagger A second number refers to position in lance (does not apply to Dragon-Five or –Six).  
**Dragon-One**—'D' Company's first lance  
**Dragon-Two**—'D' Company's second lance  
**Dragon-Three**—'D' Company's third lance  
**Dragon-Five**—1st Sergeant, 'D' Company  
**Dragon-Six**—Commander, 'D' Company  
**Heavy**—radio callsign of 'H' Company, 2nd Squadron, 3d Cavalry, attached to TF Dagger. Numerals assigned mirror 'D' Company's  
**Raven**—radio callsign of CyberPunk detachment, attached to TF Dagger  
**Hardhat**—radio callsign of Combat Engineer (Mech) lance, attached to TF Dagger  
**Fireball**—radio callsign of artillery units attached to TF: Dagger

**3d Cavalry Regiment (Brave Rifles)**

**Brave Rifles-Six**—Commander, 3d Cavalry  
**Remington**—Headquarters & Headquarter Troop, 3d Cavalry  
**Tiger**—1st Squadron, 3d Cavalry  
**Sabre**—2nd Squadron, 3d Cavalry  
**Thunder**—3rd Squadron 3d Cavalry  
**Long-Knife**—4th Squadron (Air), 3d Cavalry  
**Havoc Hounds**—Headquarters and Headquarters Troop, 3rd Squadron, 3d Cavalry  
**Ironhawk**—'I' Troop, 3rd Squadron, 3d Cavalry  
**Nomad**—'N' Troop (Attack), 4th Squadron, 3d Cavalry  
**Outlaw**—'O' Troop (Attack), 4th Squadron, 3d Cavalry  
**Pegasus**—'P' Troop (Attack), 4th Squadron, 3d Cavalry  
**Quicksilver**—'Q' Troop (Scout), 4th Squadron, 3d Cavalry  
**Sapper**—Engineering Company  
**Skynet**—Official callsign, air-defense section  
**Thunder God**—Unofficial callsign, air-defense section, not used when 3rd Squadron is in the area because of similarity of callsigns.  
**Dust Cloud**—Armor battalion (hover), attached 3d Cavalry  
**Crankshaft**—Combat Engineering Battalion, attached 3d Cavalry

**Others**

**Avalon-Six**—Commander, 41st Avalon Hussars

* * *

_Primus_, per instruction Precentor Planting has sent me the following information which I have forwarded under the highest of priority levels and security codes. It is based on on-going radio intercepts and preliminary analysis of combat action.

Both the forces of the Inner Sphere and the Clans generally deploy unit commanders of the company/trinary equivalent formations as part of that formation. In effect the company commander/star captain commands his own lance/star plus two others (one other in the case of a binary).

Contrasting this, the ground elements of these newcomers deploy three lance/platoons in a mech/armor company _and in addition a_ two-unit command element. This allows the company commander the ability to be close enough to the action to still lead, but also relieves him of having to do the job of a junior officer, as well as his own.

_Dragon_ and _Heavy_ companies conform to this organization. Each deploys two lances of medium BattleMechs and one of lighter units, in addition to the command element. Exact models are identified as all Star League-vintage or earlier, but equipped with systems in advance of anything that was deployed outside of, perhaps, the Royal Black Watch.

_Hardhat_—a single lance of combat engineers (mechs) led by a Sergeant First Class. Primary roles are in laying down fire- and smoke-screens, and are equipped with a large variety of systems to do both.

_Raven_—a two-BattleMech element that likely specializes in electronic warfare. No further information is available at this time.

_Mustang_—is listed as a heavy battalion (assumption, that this indicates a battalion of heavy BattleMechs rather than a reinforced battalion), but fielded only eighteen units. It's primary combat element deployed in three lance-sized units in contrast to normal Cavalry deployment of both BattleMechs and conventional armor. The remaining six BattleMechs were organized into one support formation, but were usually referred to separately.

As of this writing, 'N', 'O', and 'P' troops are no longer combat effective. At least one more air attack troop existed at the start of the Planting campaign, current status unknown. A new aerial troop has been organized from survivors, currently designated 'Maverick'.

_Havoc Hounds_ are no longer reporting in and are believed hit by a headhunter attack as _Thunder_ is likewise off the net.

It seems likely to me that the units using the callsigns _Thunder God_ and _Skynet_ are one and the same, but the possibility of two distinct units exists.

By Order of the Primus  
For the Glory of the Blessed Blake  
I remain &etc.  
_C_.

***** MESSAGE ENDS *****


	17. Chapter 15

**Chapter 15**

The Cavalry—or at least the Brave Rifles—had developed two contingency ROE over the last fourteen years. The first, ROE Zeta, mirrors our opponent's ROE. In most cases it was used when our opponent was using something our ROE normally wouldn't permit, but in this case it had been applied to restrict us. By dropping it with my 'Pandora' signal I had returned _Dagger_ to our normal ROE.

I picked one of the _Wreckingballs_, and hit my jump jets while also locking _Bun Bun_'s arms so that they pointed straight down. One hard boost brought me over the mech, and I rained down PPC and laser fire from on high while Bun Bun used bursts from its foot and hip jets to prove that the Niven Doctrine—a reaction drive's efficiency as a weapon is in direct proportion to its efficiency as a drive—still held true. But even _Bun Bun_'s jets couldn't keep a 75-ton mech in the air for forever.

Fortunately they didn't have to.

_Bun Bun_ tooted up a kill

An autocannon round took _Bun Bun_ in the side and I snapped off a shot back at Radick. One PPC missed and the range was too long for my standard laser secondary armament, but I rippled off another burst of _Bun Bun_'s autocannon.

He broke off, shifting his mech's stance to open his unengaged side and move his compromised armor away from me.

I hit the arm square-on with an autocannon round, waited a tic more for the ER-PPCs to flash green, but only hit with one of them, the left one this time. Heat was starting to build, but it wasn't an issue yet.

Some shock damage had either carried through to the actuators or there was less armor there than _Bun Bun_ had computed because he was definitely favoring the arm now. Probably the later since _Bun Bun_ was operating with the assumption that they had armor roughly equivalent to ours.

He circled towards my left, right side still leading though not by much. I circled to his left, keeping the distance open. The arm came up, but nothing happened. I must have knocked out the gun, or perhaps the feed chute since the last few hits looked a little high up to get the cannon. The other arm wasn't pointing at me, and _Bun Bun_ threw up a holographic side-bar that displayed an analysis of its unegaged arm. It hadn't moved since before my _Pandora_ signal, most likely locked down to prevent further damage to the actuators.

"Open line, designated target."

_Bun Bun_ considered this for a moment, then informed _Raven_ who automatically shut down the jamming on a specific frequency.

"You are combat ineffective," I informed him. "Further contest on your part is pointless. Will you surrender?"

"_Neg!_" he shouted at me, and then did something I didn't expect at all. He charged me.

I hit the jets and got out of the way before he could open up with his short-range missiles, but it was a close thing. "What the heck?" I asked. "Surrender."

"No!" he shouted. "Destroy me or I shall destroy you!"

"Fine," I said. "Close channel. _Bun Bun_, direct control, autocannon, single-shot, slave it to the right stick."

The stick in my right hand went slack as it stopped controlling _Bun Bun_'s movements, then stiffened again. The targeting reticule for the autocannon drifted across the screen as I played the stick. _Bun Bun_ turning obligingly to face the enemy mech as I slid the reticule to a stop on the mech's cockpit.

"So be it," I said softly, drifted the crosshair down a little more. "Lock."

The crosshair burned gold with a ring of red around it. Now, no matter what I did, as long as I didn't move out of the cone-shaped area that the autocannon could adjust to fire in, _Bun Bun_ would keep it locked on that spot if it was possible.

He charged me again and I triggered a single shot.

For a moment the mech stayed upright, then it slowly started to collapse to the ground, picking up speed until he struck with a crash that was enough to rattle me in my cockpit.

Things in my immediate area were under control, so I had _Bun Bun_ flip the ARES tac-display to third-person and zoomed out.

_Mustang_ looked to be in pretty good condition. The woofies deployed out-sized lances of mixed weight classes, instead of having mechs of the same weight range deployed in a lance like we did. It gave each of them a maneuver-element and a strike-element, but it also meant that if they went up against a heavy unit a number of their mechs were going to be going up against machines twice their mass or more. Their God-awful energy weapons—and however the hell they had managed to cram a missile battery that heavy into a _Wreckingball_, and still have the speed, armor, _and_ the lasers as well?—aside, we seemed to be fairly evenly matched.

And wasn't that a scary thought? _Raven_ had to be playing merry hell with their tracking and targeting gear, but aside from causing some of their missiles to go erratic it didn't seem to be slowing down their targeting any. We were faster, which was a plus in an open-field battle, but if they got us in a city or other constricted terrain that advantage would disappear really quick.

Of the ten woofies that had engaged _Mustang_, six had been on the heavy-side lights and mid-weight mediums. They had faced off against machines at a twenty-five ton, or more, disadvantage. Against what the Hussars were fielding that was actually a winning match-up for them. Against us, with their better energy weapons and missile launchers versus our better ballistics and especially electronic warfare, it was a slugging-match.

The other four had been more even affairs. Their ballistics didn't seem as good, which perhaps explained my battle, but their energy weapons made up for it. They had a laser with better range than any PPC I'd heard of—Percy Whitman had gone up against one of the _Wreckingballs_ and found that not only did his lasers not measure up to the woofie's, but the other mech-jock had figured out that by staggering missiles launches only very slightly had an annoying tendency to make the LPDS disregard the second missile flight.

Percy's _Black Knight_ was _Mustang_'s only loss, and he had punched clear at which point the woofie had decided to go find someone else rather than total the disabled mech so there was a chance that it could be recovered.

_Camelot_-4—Lance 2 had a commander named Penn-Drakkon, and guys named Percival, Gareth, and McGowain who drove an _Excalibur, Lancelot, Black Knight, and Galahad_ respectively, hence the nickname—was calling in a fire mission from _Long Rifle_. I paused to watch as more than two hundred missile tracks originating from just four mechs went inbound on Percy's attacker. I had been on the receiving end during sims—there just isn't all that much to do to keep occupied on a dropship—and it was just as awe-inspiring (if just a little less, 'oh _shit_') to watch being done for real.

But then it was time to get back to my job.

"_Dragon_-Six, report _Dagger_-Prime."

"Bit busy here, Boss," Jeff Rawson, captain of 'D' Dragon company, said in a strained voice.

"Fine, _Dragon_-5."

First Sergeant Marion Dobbs—known as 'Mary' to only a few hearty souls—responded almost immediately. "Third Platoon's taken a pounding. Six is dealing with a fucker that's already taken down 'Tori Bourne and Danielle Hackler. Victoria's dead, her _Hermes_ was down and the woofie shot the cockpit pretty deliberately. We aren't sure about Dani, her mech reports that all linkages with the cockpit are offline."

I frowned for a moment. D Company's third lance had been filled with light mechs since Amaris launched his coup, and for almost as long (or maybe longer) had been filled entirely by women. Not unheard of, but rare, impossibly rare to stay that way for fourteen years of war. To the best of my knowledge there had never been a deliberate policy of staffing it only with women, but it had happened anyway and with it came the almost inevitable nickname. "Which members of the Bitch Patrol?" I asked.

"Three and Four," Dobbs reported. "And their lieutenant is damaged. Tony Persinger, One-Four, had his _Shadow Hawk_ blown to bits, but he punched out safely. _Dragon_-Two-Three is also out. Fortunately, that woofie let it go at cutting out the mech's legs. It's out of the fight, but recoverable. In addition to four downed mechs we have five with battle damage. Lieutenant Metcalf's damage is worse. Her armor is in decent shape, but she has a bunch of impact-shock problems."

"Understood," I told him. "_Heavy_-Six, report _Dagger_-Prime."

"Two friendly KIAs, one friendly WIA and forced evac, one rider dismounted. Four friendly mechs crippled or destroyed in total, five mechs damaged. Enemy forces have been neutralized." Eugene Mahler, _Heavy_'s Captain, reported tightly.

Shit. That was nearly a third of my lighter forces gone, and the only thing that had kept it from being worse was that one Ancil Radick had decided to throw most of his strength at _Mustang_ first.

"Who?" I asked

"Corporal Jacinta Ortiz-Castro, _Hoplite_, second lance, KIA. Sergeant Nikita Kutusov, _Firefly_, third lance, KIA. Lieutenant Adrienne Hensley, first lance, WIA and in need of evac. Sergeant Dustin Slaughter, _Dervish_, second lance, dismounted. That tally includes both of the missile carriers in my second/fires lance.

"Do you want a listing of damage?"

"No, that's alright," I said. The hell it was. Not only were both LRM-support mechs in his second lance down, but so was the only other mech in his company with long range missiles, Kutusov's _Firefly_. The only fire-support mech left in both D and H companies was _Dragon-_Two-One. "Secure a landing zone for MEDEVAC."

"Brave Rifles, Sir."

I turned back to the battle raging around me. Tammy was using her _Warhammer_ to bait one of the mid-sized machines that the woofies seemed to favor and had at least a half-dozen different versions of, while Max Irons, my Sergeant Major, stalked closer for the kill. A _Black Knight_ that had to belong to Percival Whitman, _Mustang_-Two-Three, was down with a gaping hole in its chest where the engine should have been. As I watched a cluster of missile hits from Ivania's _Orion_ blew apart one of the _Wreckingball'_s left hip, sending the machine crashing to the ground.

The cockpit hatch slid open and a man climbed out. A moment later a flicker of light connected the figure and Ivania' cockpit.

"Hey, Boss, fucker just pulled a laser pistol on me," Ivania informed me. She sounded more amused than anything else. "What's up with that?"

"No idea," I said.

"_Dagger_-Prime, Angel Flight inbound your position. Is landing zone secure?"

"Negative, Angel Flight," I replied. "LZ is not, repeat _not_ secure at this time. Wait a moment." I flipped to the _Mustang_-general push. "_Mustang_, Six, Angel flight is inbound. Quit playing around."

Tammy and Max obligingly closed in on their opponent, She took a hit from a laser at well beyond any reasonable range for such a weapon, then cored the mech with her PPCs while the S-Maj caught it in the back with his lasers.

"_Dagger_, _Heavy_-six, we're secure."

"_Dragon_-six, all secure _Mustang_."

And…_Mustang_ was secure as well as the last woofie mech plowed into the dust.

"_Dagger_-elements, _Dagger_-Prime. _Raven_, secure jamming. _Hardhat_, dismount to inspect downed mechs. George," I called my XO, "I need you to establish a secure perimeter and identify troops to dismount for SAR and Salvage Ops. Angel flight, _Dagger_-Prime. Landing zone is secure. _Dragon_-Six, _Heavy_-Six, get a read on final damages and report in."

"_Dagger_, _Shotgun_, we are tracking Angel flight now," Hans Gruber reported.

"Understood," I told him as I hit the quick release on the straps and unhooked myself from the command chair. There was a secure rack of gear next to the hatch. I grabbed a respirator on the way out because you never knew what you might come across that was burning and a lot of it was bad for your lungs, and I grabbed my battle rifle because I had once upon a time been an infantryman. To the infantry, a person wandering around without a rifle is important. Important people had another name too; we called them 'targets.' The first rule to surviving in a war was not to be a target.

Like all rules, this one was subject to the needs of the Service.

I shimmied down the outside of _Bun Bun_ and jogged back to where I'd left the downed woofie. The hatch had a simple mechanical bypass in case the electronics had shorted out and no sign at all of anything that might resemble a security feature. There was blue mech-coolant splattered all over the place and I held the respirator in place with one hand as I leaned forward with the other and touched a general issue chemical detector to some of the stuff.

The sensor thought about it for a moment, then flashed green. I felt a little better about that, given the apparent decline in military capability I wouldn't have put it past people to be using a coolant that rotted lungs if breathed in. Of course, these woofies had apparently not only _not_ backslid, but had actually improved on the tech available back when we were from. Well, available in general circulation anyway.

* * *

'Star Captain Ancil Radick' was still alive and strapped into his command couch, and was also quite unconscious.

"Interesting."

I started hard enough that I would have hurt myself if I hadn't been wearing the helmet.

The man who'd come up behind me looked like an actor that had stepped off a soundstage in middle of shooting a trideo featuring ancient motorcycle gangs. He was big, broad-shouldered, with long grey hair pulled back in a pony tail that just had to be awkward as hell in a battlemech. Tattoos decorated his forearms, and he had one of those pencil-thin fu Manchu mustaches that dropped down halfway to his chest.

"I'm Merlin," he said. "Zorro can bring both of our mechs online in a second or so if he needs to."

"You're one of the Cybers," I said.

He smiled but it didn't reach his eyes. "Can I come in?"

I got out of the cockpit and he slipped in. "What are you doing?"

"I'm either going to drain its computers dry, or give it a lobotomy," he told me.

"Do both."

"_Mustang_-Six, this is Five."

I tapped the com-link build into the neuro-helm that rebroadcast through _Bun Bun_. "Go, Five."

"I have the damage and stores report."

"Let's hear it."

"H company has two dead, one person in second lance and another in third lance. They have one person wounded and slated for evacuation, the commander of first lance. They have a fourth who is dismounted and is going to be evaced. Another five mechs are damaged, those of Heavy-Five, Heavy-One-Two, Heavy-One-Three, Heavy-Two-One, and Heavy-Two-Two. All have lost armor, but Heavy-One-Two is reporting joint damage in his _Crab_'s right arm, Heavy-One-Three has lost one of her SRM-2 packs, and Heavy-Two-One has an unspecified jam in her LPDS's training gear. One of the engineers is taking a look, but what can be done in the way of field repairs is limited.

"D company has two dead, Dragons-Three-Three and Three-Four. Their third lance leader is wounded but insists she is combat-capable. Dragon-Two-Three lost a leg. There is no way to repair it in the field, and the driver is slated for evac. Dragon-One-Four's mech was destroyed but he ejected safely."

"Have the medics from Angel flight check Lieutenant Metcalf," I replied. "If they agree with her, fine. If they don't agree that she's combat-capable, disable it and evac her.

"Also, have someone check Metcalf's mech. I was informed there was extensive impact-shock damage. If it can't make a decent clip, and doesn't have a good weapon load or reasonable armor coverage left, she hitches a ride with Angel flight regardless of what the medics say."

"Understood. Dragon-Six, Dragon-One-Two, Dragon-One-Three, Dragon-Two-Two, and Dragon-Three-One have all taken damage. Two-Two has lost its experimental close-in laser array."

"One of the _Sentinel_'s?" I asked.

"Yes."

"The thing only worked half the time anyway," I said. "Anything else?"

"Two-One doesn't report taking any damage, but his Artemis control unit has apparently decided that it is no longer functional."

"Wonderful," I muttered. "How about us?"

"Percy is alive and slated for evac," George said. "His _Black Knight_ needs a workshop but is repairable. Everyone else in lance, er, comp—"

"Call 'em lances, we might as well," I interrupted.

"—Lance two," he went on, "has damage. The Sergeant Major came through without a scratch, again, but the rest of Lance One has damage, and the same goes for Lance Three except for Ralph. And _Mustang_-Four-Three has been damaged.

"There is some system damage. Tammy's second SRM-4 pack is refusing to upload targeting data to missiles in its second and fourth tubes. Gareth Delaney's _Lancelot_'s ERPPC is out of service, which limits him to two-thirds his normal engagement range and the best third of his long-range firepower. When things devolved into a free-for-all Ivania's _Orion_ was hit really hard. She lost one magazine well for her gauss rifle, one of the pulse lasers had been knocked out of alignment, and a laser cored her ECM computer. What armor she has left is mighty thin…where she has any armor at all. I can _see_ the chassis structural members it's been scrapped so thin."

"Ammunition?" I asked. There wasn't anything I could do for Ivania. Maybe have some of the units with hand actuators try and replace the armor from the dead mechs? No, not enough time, not the right training.

"As far as missiles go we're down to half stocks on all obscurants across the board," George said grimly. "Thermo/optical occlusion, laser-disrupting aerosol, active-decoy—not that we ever had many of those. We still have full loads of most specials, but standard warshots have been depleted, as much as half the LRMs on some of the lighter units, but generally around a third gone. SRMs we still have in good supply."

"Ballistics?"

"Yellow," George replied.

"Across the board?" I asked.

"Among those engaged," he said. "But that's only just the far side of green, and it varies quite a bit from mech to mech, and some of it is because of losses."

"Okay. George, you next task is to find out who has the most experience and a mech with hand actuators. Find out if any ammunition can be salvaged from the downed mechs and used to top of the rest of us."

I acknowledged his response as a powered cart with a trio of medics pulled up. It was an ugly white-painted thing designed to hold to patients strapped onto stretchers on racks in the back. There was just enough room for two medics to watch them and all the equipment one would expect in a professional ambulance and quite a few things that most people wouldn't expect. It had thick, over-sized tires that laughed at rough country, and a wide body that was low to the ground to improve its center of gravity.

The two in back climbed out, followed by the third who was driving. Merlin climbed out of the cockpit and all three somehow managed to climb inside the mech.

"Get what you wanted?" I asked.

"Yep," he said. "Security codes were pathetic. Oh, and I wiped it like you said."

"Totally?" I asked.

"Yes, well, not exactly," he said. "I wiped out most of it, but I also put in my own program. It looks like scrambled code, but it really isn't. Let's just say that the next person who hooks up their brainpan to that mech is going to get a really unpleasant surprise."

"Wonderful," I said dryly as he walked away.

One of the medics came out.

"How is he?"

"Concussion, internal injuries, shock, gyrostabilizer feedback trauma—it looks like you managed to cause damage to the information pathways so it spat back a corrupted data stream. Really unpleasant for you 'mech-jock types."

Most mech-jocks would have been offended, either by his cavalier attitude for the undisputed emperor's of the battlefield, or for being called a 'mech-jock'. A properly trained commander of the Most Awesome Weapon ever designed by man is not a 'mech-jock. He is a MechWarrior, or, perhaps, a pilot. Certainly not a 'mech-jock'. Now me? I wasn't one of those 'properly trained' peacocks.

I was a waster kid from one of the most lawless belter-rocks—all belter rocks were pretty much lawless as far as anyone who wasn't a belter was concerned, the reality is that most of them are fairly nice places to live as long as you understand the cultural rules. My home rock wasn't one of those nice ones. It was one of the ones that GNN had decided that it couldn't use to show how bad things were for the 'poor belters' because the show would never get past the censors if they did. That I'd gotten off it had probably kept me from going out an airlock sans suit by age seventeen. Two weeks on Mars was just enough time for a magistrate to 'suggest' that I join the SLDF where I had ended up in the poor bloody infantry.

If there was anyone with less of the traditional respect for a mech-jock than I had, I had yet to meet him. They were soldiers, and soldiers killed and if they were lucky they copped it fast and if they didn't they got to roll around in their gore and shit and piss for a couple of hours first as they drowned in their own blood.

Forget those stories of knight-errants who went around righting wrongs. The only wrongs that the original ones righted were their empty moneybags. What the Vikings had started, they turned into a high art-form. A mech has the power to destroy a city; why by any Gods or Goddesses you would care to name do you think a mech-jock wouldn't go ahead and use it?

I had no problem at all being called a mech-jock. It was only the truth after all.

"He going to die?" I asked.

"No, nothing that serious," he said. "Well, maybe in some backwaters. With us he'll even be able to pilot a mech again in a month or two. We'll have to tank him though."

I shivered. The tank was the latest and best in Hegemony medical science and no one really knew what long-term effects of its use were. It could, however, fix a person back up to full health as long as a reasonably functioning brain and spinal column, and a still-beating heart were dropped into it. The Docs swore it was safe, but there were still rumors of people who had gone into the tank but had come out…different. And why, if the thing was so effective and (relatively) inexpensive, were the Docs still fixing people the old way?

The canker-mechanics left as the engineer-types strolled up and began opening the mech up to drop in blocks of explosives.

"Thanks for putting this one on its back," one told me. "One of the _Dragon_ boys put theirs on its chest. We're going to have to open up the CASE blow-out panels to get to the ammunition stocks and then explosive-wield them back into place. The engine core on that one is going to be a pure bitch to get to."

His assistant wasn't a proper engineer at all, but a corporal named Ralph Corbin who normally jockeyed a _Flashman_ in my third company/lance. He tossed me an informal salute that I returned before wandering off in the direction of my 'mech.

* * *

'Spiking your guns' is an old artillery term. Really old. So old in fact that it comes from a time when firearms with honest-to-deity-of-your-choice _rifled_ barrels were new-fangled infantry weapons. At least, it may very well be older. In those days artillery was still loaded by shoving bags of powder down the muzzle of the gun, followed by sliding in a ball of iron, or a canister of smaller balls of iron, or scrap metal, or person, or other projectile of your choice. A second hole would have been drilled through the top of the piece down into the chamber/barrel where the powder was. After the gun was loaded a tube filled with gun powder would have been stuck down this second hole to prick open the bags of gunpowder. Then everyone would take a step back and a slow match would have been applied and…_BLAM_.

Spiking your guns meant sticking a piece of iron down the touch-hole, then using a rammer (usually used to make sure the powder and ball were all nicely compacted at the breech of the gun) would be rammed down to bend the iron spike. This made the spike irremovable, and thus made the cannon useless. This in turn meant that you could abandon your guns and run (an army without heavy weapons moves faster than one with) and your enemies couldn't use them against you.

I just wanted to explain this because there was one advantage of those ancient artillery tubes had that 'mechs don't. You could spike them _fast_. Unless you removed all the safety features on a fusion plant and dump all of a mech's fuel into it, and then get clear of the impending nuclear catastrophe, there just aren't that many ways of quickly, reliably, and permanently disabling a 'mech short of sitting around and shooting it to pieces.

Part of me was tempted to do just that. The problem was that if we won, the downed woofie mechs would be really valuable, even busted up. As far as I knew _our_ mechs were suddenly a finite resource, and even the ones with catastrophic damage could be cannibalized for spare parts. So I had to make sure that the woofies wouldn't get their paws on our tech if we lost, and still leave them salvageable by us if we won. Which in turn meant that I had to sit still long enough for the engineers to do their job.

It wasn't my way. It wasn't the cavalry way. Against the Fat Man we'd have marked them and follow-up units would have salvaged them, and if we'd had to pull back we would have lit them up as we past. But now we didn't have any follow-up and the only decently armed force behind us was our enemies, though our friends were beyond them. So we sat and we waited, and in the meantime I had missiles scavenged from the enemy mechs—our short-ranged missiles were virtually identical, and while they didn't have any of our specialty long-range rounds, none of the downed Cav mechs were armed with LRMs.

With _Dragon_ leading and _Heavy_ keeping a watch in back I moved them out at a trot, then kicked it up into a canter. "_Bun Bun_," I said, "let's have some trail music please."

_Bun Bun_ considered that for a beat, then the external speakers began to boom.

_I'm lonesome since I crossed the hills,  
__And over moor and valley…_


	18. Third Interlude

**Interlude 3:  
****On mech-busting, tank-plinking and why the infantry are called 'crunchies'**

East of Dantron Meander  
South bank of Dantron Meander Canal #42  
In the day, prior to Interlude 2

Staff Sergeant Lawson (Commander, Number-2 track, 2nd Platoon, 'I' _Ironhawk_ Troop, 3rd Squadron, 3d Cavalry) stared through his field glasses and tried not to cackle. Open grasslands (i.e. prairies) had been the 3d cavalry's battlefield of choice since before mankind had discovered powered flight. Their current disposition gave them not only the open field, but also the benefits of a prepared position and all the hallmarks of a real pisser of an ambush.

One of the unusual terrain features (there were several) of prairies were that people on them tended to think they were flat. The truth was that they were only _almost_ flat. The bit of lands that the woofies were crossing now had a rise of almost exactly one meter for every two hundred and fifty of linear.

That imperceptible slope came to a rather abrupt end that featured a very steep slope down to a canal used to move water from the massive Dantron Meander—meander was a local colloquial for 'big river with water that _looks_ slow-moving', but Lawson had been exposed to so many planetary, and even local, colloquials that unless it had to do with military realities he tended to ignore it—out to equally massive (if more spread out) agricultural fields.

Two hundred meters of water later another steep slope led up to Lawson's side of the canal, where it quickly flattened out to the familiar, almost imperceptible, slope.

In fact, not just the slope was almost imperceptible. The geometry was just right that the canal was effectively invisible from ground level until you were standing at the edge of the slope. The odds were pretty good that between their aerospace fighters and the ships still in orbit that the woofies knew the canal was there, but knowing about something and seeing it are two very different things…

Especially on the prairie where the land likes to play tricks with your eyes.

While the precise cuts had been made so that the 'unsightly' canal didn't mar the local scenery, an early 18th century military engineer would have instantly recognized familiar features. A sloped _glacis_ that left the attacker under fire during the approach also masked the defender's walls. A _ditch_ that would have to be crossed, with steep sides to complicate the job. A _scarp_—in this case made of ceramcrete—that started at the base of the still-steeper slope and had a thirty-two degree incline led down to the water which flowed eight meters deep at this point. The _scarp_ continued under the water until it was well under water, then featured a four-meter vertical drop to the canal bed. A _counterscarp_ on the defender's side of the ditch would have to be climbed. Straight lines throughout prevented the creation of dead-spaces where flanking defenders would be unable to shoot.

If necessary Lawson's four H6X-PM _Hexapuma_ main battle tanks could button up and deep-ford it, just like the Mathison-built DR-C4T _Direcat_ AFVs, TRO-11 _Troll_ mortar-carriers, and the TRO-12 FiST that made up the rest of _Ironhawk_ troop. A team of special combat engineers from _Crankshaft_, the combat enhancement engineering battalion that had been attached to the Brave Rifles, had been forming their positions well before the cavalry had arrived to help finish the job in anticipation of the impending First Contact. In addition to their fighting and fallback positions, massive steel plates had been laid down along both sides of the bottom of the canal. Anchored under those plates were massive bladders. At a radio-command they would inflate, pushing up the plates, and forming an incline sturdy enough for the tracks to get over the underwater wall.

Five kilometers…four…

They were fast. Not as fast as most of the 3d's tanks and other vehicles, but faster than the Hussars were.

Lawson looked off to his left where an armor company of the 41st Avalon Hussars was entrenched. He didn't much care for trying to integrate two complete different units whose troops knew nothing about each other. Lack of trust in the other's capability, lack of shared misery, unfamiliarity with the other's capabilities, equipment, traditions, tactics… The whole thing sounded ripe for disaster, especially since they were going to go into battle together, for the first time, less than twelve hours after it was decided to pair them up.

But there hadn't been time to do more, Lawson allowed. No time for the Marines to set up an ambush in the canal. No time for the air-cav to get set up and bring in their _Orca_ gunships. No time to mine the approaches.

Lawson reached down, his fingers caressing the control that dropped his seat down into its combat position. He pulled the hatch closed after him, not trusting the automatics to do the job, and dogged it down. "Loader, load _long lance_."

The FIREGEMS, or Flexible-Intent Rapid Engagement (Gun/Energy/Missile) System—those who worked with it tended to call it 'gummy'—accounted for just over a quarter of a _Hexapuma_'s total mass. At seventeen and a half tons it massed more than some artillery systems Lawson had worked with. The forced-air system used to clear the barrel was needlessly complex and not as effective as advertised, the gun had a habit of fouling—the effects of the propellant by-products when subjected to highly charged particle-fields were particularly unpleasant to clean—and the auto-loader (necessary given the size of the projectiles) had a distressing tendency to load arms and heads into the breech of the gun.

But for all of its admittedly many shortcomings, it could fire an AC-20-class round with a semi-combustible casing. By dropping out the block and ramming a particle generator into the breech it could function as a particle projection cannon at mid-range, and the PPC capacitor built into the turret made the thing a holy terror. And finally, the bore would accept the _long lance_ missile, which had all the destructive power of five Standard LRMs and nearly two klicks of range.

Reloading time, predictably, sucked. Nearly twelve seconds for the cannon, almost twenty for the missile, and swapping out the breech block for the particle generator took nearly the same amount of time.

"_Lance_, up!" This from the loader whose job included operating the ECM suite and the LPDS as well as managing the auto-loading gear. This in turn freed the gunner to concentrate on servicing targets while Lawson directed. The loader's station also had a set of controls so that he could direct the gun if the gunner was injured or had a systems fault. Lawson had another such station with over-ride controls for if he saw a target and there wasn't time to direct the gunner to it; and unlike the loader's, Lawson's included controls for the coaxial medium laser which was the only other weapon besides the gummy that the _Hexapuma_ carried.

"Set engagement, twelve-hundred meters," Lawson directed the gunner. The plan to retain the _long lance_'s full range for a rainy day wasn't something he particularly agreed with. As fast as the woofies were they'd get exactly three shots off before the woofies were in range of the cannon. There wouldn't be time enough to make swapping in the particle cannon effective…or there wouldn't have been over open terrain.

"Engagement set, twelve hundred," came the response.

"All _Thunders_, _Thunder_-Six," came the voice of 3rd Squadron's commander. "Hold until twelve hundred meters, then engage at will."

Lawson ignored the broadcast, it hadn't told him anything that hadn't already been planned, and swept his targeting scope over the advancing mechs. "Target!" he snapped. "Birdie-looking one. Designate uh…"

"Warbler," the Gunner said in agreement, then "Target!"

"_Patty_," Lawson told the voice-interface of the _Hexapuma_'s computer system, "designate target as a _Warbler_."

The new designation for the mech with reverse-jointed legs and a stooped cockpit went out to the rest of the Brave Rifles.

"Engagement to auto," Lawson said.

"Missile system to auto." This with some reluctance that Lawson didn't blame his gunner for, but didn't change his mind either.

"Two missiles, then switch to beam," Lawson continued. 'Beam' was used to keep 'PPC' from being lost in the tank's noisy interior and because 'Particle Projection Cannon' just took too damn long to say.

"Two _lances_, then beams," Loader agreed.

"Charge the capacitor, standby point defense, standby ECM."

The Loader repeated it all back and then Lawson was out of ideas.

Well, he had _one_ idea left.

"_Patty,_ broadcast in the clear. To the person driving the mech that looks like a diseased pigeon with plucked wings on the far right of your formation—that's the _western_ side, you numbskulls—that's right, _you_ the one with the mangy dog-head and the designator Alpha-Two-Five stenciled on your breast because you continually forget what your callsign is. I am Staff Sergeant Obadiah Lawson, and I am your doom. Let no warrior with honor interfere with your impending demise…but if you want I'll grant you five seconds to designate your chosen pallbearers and chief mourner for your funeral."

He thumbed the switch to close the channel and a moment later the intercom built into his helmet transmitted his crews' laughter.

"'I am your doom?'" quoted the Gunner.

"They like their fancy little declarations, don't they?" Lawson asked. "That's what the brief said." _Patty_ was piping in background chatter as other tankers made similar challenges, and on the tactical displays, units flashed as they were taken so that none were challenged more than once.

"—Lawson," a coldly precise male voice separated from the rest as _Patty_ recognized the name and correctly interpreted it as being for Lawson. "I am MechWarrior Deener, and I pilot the sole _Mad Dog_ OmniMech is Alpha Star, Supernova Second, 341st Assault Cluster. It is I who shall be your doom, Spheroid. I will grant you until the first shot is fired to compose your last message to your next of kin."

"_Mad Dog_?" Lawson asked without tripping the broadcast switch or telling _Patty_ to transmit. "For a group calling itself 'Clan Wolf?' Is he serious?"

_Bam_.

The recoil of the gun was gentle compared to the blast from the standard shells. But then the _long lance_ only needed a charge strong enough to kick it clear of the tank so that its rocket engine wouldn't harm the launching vehicle.

Lawson took control of the missile, guiding it up for a drop-down attack profile while the Gunner set up his second shot. Other missiles were in the air from the line of cavalry tanks, but Lawson's was leading them a—

The image on the repeater screen blanked as the missile was destroyed, but _Patty_ recorded a hit along the enemy mech's waist.

The tank shuddered again as a second missile was launched, and like the first, a wave of missiles followed it. Lawson let the computer direct this one, the Loader was already swapping out the breech-block for the particle generator.

"Power to the tracks!" reported the driver, though Lawson hadn't given that order yet, but he kept them still. It meant that Lawson only had to say the word for the private in the driver's seat to get them moving.

"_Miss_," the Gunner reported the results of the second missile attack.

Less than half a kilometer away, enemy mechs were starting down the embankment/scarp for the channel/ditch.

"Beam's up!" reported the Loader.

"Link capacitor."

"Linked!"

"Target, _Warbler_."

"Target!" This from the Gunner.

"Fire!" The PPC whined and the heat in the cramped turret climbed.

"Hit!" called the Gunner.

"Excellent, continue engagement without the capacitor," Lawson said, not wanting to wait for the thing to charge now that battle had been joined. "ECM to active."

"The music is on," the Loader reported.

Lasers flashed in response, burning into the pile of dirt that Lawson's _Hexapuma_ was hull-down behind. The mech's shoulder-mounted missile racks gushed light and smoke.

"Point-defense free!"

The LPDS flared

The mechs entered the water as figures began to flake off of them.

"Enemy battle armor in sight!" someone reported over the radio as missiles began to fall.

A lot missed, smacking into the dirt that had been thrown up to build a fighting position for the _Hexapuma_. The LPDS had done its work and destroyed still more, but _Patty_ still took hits that pitted the tank's armor.

Lawson's Gunner fired again and missed.

The engineers had laid down a strip of radar-reflectors that were supposed to, in theory, at a distance make the canal look as though the inclines carried through to the bottom instead of the four-meter drop-offs. Up close they were only supposed to look like an odd choice of construction material. How well it would work at either purpose was anyone's guess, but they had the additional effect of also hiding the ramps that the tanks could use if necessary.

The slopes _did_ ease after they passed below the water, but it only meant a longer trot out into the water for the woofie mechs. They were in to mid-thigh when they suddenly dropped into water that lapped at the bottom edges of their cockpits.

Angry lasers and particle beams lashed the counterscarp, but for all of their destructive power, energy weapons had relatively little _penetrative_ power. Dirt was fused to glass, but that was about it. The turret-pod-like missile racks of the mechs that the Hussars designated _Mad Cats_ were out of water, and missiles flew at the cavalry, but to little response.

There was something odd about it, Lawson thought. Only ten mechs, plus the battle armor that had been riding on them, were attacking. More mechs, probably with additional armor, was holding back at fifteen hundred meters. Inside _long lance_ range, but they didn't know that, so why…

"Forlorn Hope," he grunted.

"Sarge?" asked the Gunner

"You ever study the Napoleonic wars, Hutchins?"

"Not really, why?"

"Because back then they made defenses sort of like this but on a smaller scale, intended for infantry," Lawson said. "Usually it was a dry ditch, but the principal holds."

"Oh…so?"

"So in those days they'd use artillery to knock down walls and open a hole, then a group of men, maybe a heavy company or so, would go into the ditch and rush the breach. They were called the 'Forlorn Hope'."

"Why?"

"Why did they do it, or why were they called it?" Lawson asked.

"Either…both."

"Because back in those days they used muzzle loaders and a good soldier could fire three rounds a minute. Some people could do four, but the elite regiments averaged three rounds a man a minute. Cannons took even longer to load. By sending in a Forlorn Hope it was hoped that the defenders would expend their loaded weapons and that the assaulters would beat down some of the defenses for the follow-on troops…:

Lawson fell quiet for a moment as between the counterscarp and the fighting position he lost the angle on his target. "Back us up, fifteen meters."

The tank lurched into motion as the driver threw them into reverse.

"Right turn, two o'clock, forward twenty to alternate two."

Lawson was slammed back in his seat and his helmet slammed against something that would have been painful without it, as the tank spun in place then slammed forward. "Gunner, switch to cannon. Load assault charge, half-second delayed contact fuse."

"Switching to Cannon!"

"Assault charge, half-second contact delay!"

Lawson continued via the intercom as the particle generator was slid out of the way and the breech block slammed home, "They were called the Forlorn Hope because it was a forlorn hope that any would survive, and they did it for money, for promotion, and for glory."

"Hey, Sarge?" spoke up the driver. "Why an assault charge? Aren't they usually used for hitting dug in positions, for busting up bunkers and berms and the like?"

"Well now, Private Cook, normally that's the case," Lawson said, trying to remember just when the kid had joined them. Before the drop on Earth, of course, but not before…you weren't with us on Carver V, were you?"

"I joined during the Bryant campaign."

"Bryant," Lawson repeated, but after so many battles on so many worlds that aside from certain memorable ones they had started to blend together. "Well, on Carver V we went in to support the Marines. It used to be their headquarters and training planet. Lots of water, lots of archipelagoes, hot little pisser of world and someone had imported every kind of miserable insect to harass new recruits with. A little high gee, a high-pressure atmosphere and low partial pressure to oxygen, a sun that was edging towards the red spectrum. In other words, a really miserable place to be.

"Gunner, hold until they get to the middle of the canal."

"Hold-fire," Hutchins agreed.

"Lots of predators," Lawson continued. "There was this thing, aquatic, looked sort of like a cross between a lion and a crocodile with the humor of a bear with a toothache, the ferocity of this here tank's namesake, and the soul of a shark. They had to be nearly our size too, now that I think about it since they could swallow a Marine in _Aquahawk_ battle armor with one bite. They learned pretty damn quick that said Marine meant for a lethal bellyache so after the first month or so they bit the Marine in half first.

"Anyway, one of the jollies showed us this neat little trick. You see, water doesn't compress, Cook. So you take an assault charge which is basically a thin metal casing filled with Comp-42, set up a delay fuse so it doesn't explode as soon as it hits the water, and place it close to your target…_Baam!_:"

"The water focuses the explosion, Cook," Hutchins explained. "That means that it acts just like a great big concussion bomb. Cracks seams, bursts seals. One moment a mech is strolling along, and the next it's shut-down from being flooded out even though it still has most of its armor."

* * *

You _clever_ little _surats_, Deener thought as blue-white PPC-bolts started to rain down on Supernova Second. The positions were well-chosen, the terrain almost classical in nature. Laborer-caste armed with spheroid machines could have held it. And, he admitted grudgingly, whoever these particular spheroids were they had good equipment. As good as that fielded by the Clans? No—well, maybe the Horses had something similar, they still clung to the use of such conventional armor after all—but better than most of the Spheroids had shown. That missile certainly deserved some looking into.

Someone, probably a technician because no self-respecting warrior was going to allow himself to be stuck doing things like 'intelligence', was going to be in for a very rough time. Whoever had plotted the terrain maps had missed the four-meter vertical drop in the canal and there was likely another at the other side as well. Neither depth nor current were deep or strong enough to make fording impossible. Scaling a four-meter vertical wall would likely prove…problematical since simply knocking it down was not an option as it would have been if a wall was found on ground. The water robbed them of their best momentum, possible enough that jumping the wall would be impossible.

He kicked hard at the pedals. His OmniMech lacked jump jets, but the myomer muscles could still propel it into the air somewhat. In the water it hopped him high enough that his missile launchers cleared the water and he had held the trigger down before he jumped.

As soon as they cleared the water and the safety interlock snapped off, and twin LRM-20 banks gushed smoke and flame as missiles arced into the air.

His mech dropped back into the water as gravity asserted its existence. A damage alarm whined and lurid codes played over his missile launchers as water lapped at the bottom edge of his cockpit. Deener stabbed out a finger, and water damage codes played over the bottom nine tubes in each of the missile racks

A massive shell through up a column of water in front of him and Deener just had time to think _artillery_ before a massive explosion slammed into his _Mad Dog_ with enough force to knock it off its feet. Damage codes played out on the monitor across his entire OmniMech as he fought to get its feet back underneath it. The front of his mech was staved in as though punched by an angry giant, and if half his missile tubes hadn't been wrecked by water intake the hit would have put them out of business as the hit twisted them off true.

Which did have the effect of more than doubling the number of shots he had for his missile racks, Deener admitted to himself; but six shots a rack just was not going to be enough.

"Point Commander Tam Tinn," he said as he played his lasers across the dirt mounded at the top of the counterscarp. The likelihood of his hitting anything was not great, but the water provided sufficient cooling that he could fire as quickly as the lasers cycled.

"Spread your point out to assist the rest of Alpha Nova's Elementals," he continued to the commander of the Elemental point that was nominally 'his'—which meant that he provided their ride into battle and supported their attacks as much as they supported his. "When I reach the other side of the canal I will kneel my _Mad Dog_ and give you a lift once the others are up."

Whatever the bloodnamed warrior thought of taking orders from a 'mere' warrior of Clan Wolf the battle armor-incased infantryman failed to let on, but Deener did note that the Elemental went ahead and did as he had said.

There was a brilliant explosion in mid-air, much like a popular New Year's firework that mimicked a utilitarian flash-bang grenade (albeit on a much grander scale). His tactical computer chewed on the data, then spit out an analysis describing a lucky mid-air hit on a very large autocannon round packed with explosives, similar to the very close hit he had taken not a minute before.

Then the explosions and PPC-impacts were behind him. He was under their line of fire, and now he was going to make them pay for it.

* * *

"He's ducked below our ability to drop the barrel," Hutchins told Lawson.

"Understood. Driver, pull us back. Loader….load a beehive."

The _Hexapuma_ had a capacity of 30 rounds of autocannon ammunition, and while most of them were standard 'solid' shot, the basic load also included assault rounds, flak for defense against air-units, a fireball round since being able to set things on fire was always useful, and beehives which turned the gummy into a high-tech twenty-eighth-century shotgun writ large.

"Really wish we had some mech support," Hutchins said.

"Mech-shmech," Lawson retorted just as a laser _sprang_ed into the hull.

"Hey, we're already engaged with some mech-joch calling himself Deener," Lawson protested as Battle Armor came over the ridge.

The response was more laser fire.

"Fire," Lawson barked.

The gun surged and the report battered at his ears despite the protective muffs that were part of the tank-crew helmet. On the virtual battlefield projected via the combat visor, one of the suits of armor literally disappeared, and a whole knot of them was knocked to the ground.

Hutchins sprayed the area with fire from the co-ax medium laser while the auto-loader rammed in another round.

"They're targeting the command vehicles!"

Lawson didn't know who made the observation over the radio, but it only took a glance at the virtual battlefield for him to see that whoever it was, was right.

"Gunner, target!" he snapped, painting a targeting carat over a mob of four suits of battle armor that were intent on opening up the Captain's _Hexapuma_ like a sardine can.

The turret twisted around.

"Target!" Hutchins replied.

"Up!"

"Fire!"

At this range the beehive was powerful enough to strip some armor from the other _Hexapuma_, but it also had the affect or ripping all of the battle armor off and scattering them to the wind.

_Clang_.

_Patty_ damage-control panel screamed as lasers tore into the rear chassis of the _Hexapuma_.

"We've got boarders!" Hutchins snapped, whipping the turret back and forth to try and shake them off to no avail.

Missiles from the dismounted infantry teams blurred through the air. Some hit battle armor. Still more went wild, their solid rocket-engines ignited by the same laser blasts that had cut down their operators.

"_Ironhawk_-Two-Two to _Ironhawk_-Six—"

In the virtual battlefield the Captain died. One moment there, the next the turret of his _Hexapuma_ was riding a column of super-heated air a hundred meters into the sky. Lieutenant Hohm's track was nowhere to be seen.

"Or any _Ironhawk_ officer, please come in." No response.

"Dewey," Lawson snapped to his Loader/Systems Operator, as he took a breather from trying to get in touch with Command in order to save his tank. "Arm a grenade!"

"You want me to _what_?"

"Arm a grenade Gods-damn it," Lawson shouted at him. "When I say, open the bay door for the _long lance_ rounds, toss it in, and then _close the fucking door!_"

"Sweet Jesus," Hutchins muttered, but he was looking at the same panel as Lawson was. The one that showed the alien-looking battle armor boring through _Patty_'s armor, right over the engine…and standing right behind the blow-out panel for the _long lance_ cell. "That's insane, Serge."

"Only insane if it blows us up too," Lawson said. "_Regulator, Ironhawk-_Two-Two. Fire-mission, over," he rapped out, his head bobbing as he counted down. "Now, Dewey, do it _now!_"

There was a _clang-clang_ as the doors of the missile magazine cycled. A half-heard prayer. And then an explosion rocked the armored compartment. The temperature grew stifling hot and the heat-exchange system—no where near as complex or efficient as those that the mechs were equipped with—whined in protest as it tried to cool the suddenly roasting compartment.

"_Regulator_," Lawson continued before his ears had cleared, "_Ironhawk_-Two-Two. Fire-mission, over."

No response.

"_Thunder_-Six,_ Ironhawk_-Two-Two."

"_Thunder_-Six-Actual, go ahead _Ironhawk_."

Lawson's eyes widened slightly. He'd been trying to get in touch with command, not the Old Man himself! "Sir, _Ironhawk_ is closely engaged with enemy battle armor. The Captain and _Ironhawk_-Two are dead, and I have not been able to establish contact with other officers." He settled the target designator on a little cluster of battle armor and settled for a generic "_Target_," instead of naming what he wanted Hutchins to shoot at.

"Target!"

"Up!"

"_Fire_!"

The standard HEAP round went into the dirt and blasted a unit of bouncing battle armor into the air. The effect, Lawson thought, was probably wasted, what with most of the explosion going off under ground.

"Switch to Beam!"

"Switching to Beams."

"We could really use some support, Colonel," Lawson said. "Most of the dismounts have had it. They can't cope with that armor." Were _all_ the lieutenants dead? "_Ironhawk_-Three-Three," he continued, trusting _Patty_ to flip between freqs but keeping a half-eye on the communications control panel all the same, "move your element south-east and shoot the bat-armor off _Hawk-_Four. One-Two, get your treads in motion and do something useful."

"Understood, Sergeant. I'm shifting _Mad Dog_—"

"_Mad Dog _hell, sir," Lawson said. "We need artillery support."

"_Regulator_ is off the net. Infiltrator team took out the FDC."

Wonderful!

"Permission to go mobile?" Lawson asked. No way in hell the battle armor could keep up with them then.

"Denied, need you to hold and buy time for the Hussars to fall back. Wait for orders, then you're going to wheel south to cover our exposed flank."

"Fucking—Driver, full back _now_!" Lawson snapped out a hand to brace himself as the _Hexapuma_ accelerated to the rear. Less than a second later his helmet bashed against something that was probably important as they went over a pair of obstacles. "Halt, forward twenty and hold—hell, sir. _Thunder_. Enemy battle armor is _in among our tracks_!"

Cover the exposed flank? Just what the hell were the Hussars supposed to have been doing?

He wasn't, quite, willing to add 'idiot' to that statement, not over the air, but he was pretty sure everyone listening heard it anyway. The man had been a genius against Amaris, but it was pretty evident that the enemy having battle armor was something he was having trouble comprehending and adapting to, and it was going to get them all killed unless some hero stood up to the plate.

Even as he thought this a tiny voice whispered in the back of his mind that it really wasn't the Colonel's fault. Anyone could be surprised when the enemy did something that was totally unexpected—there was a reason, after all, why they were called 'the enemy.' And when the surprise was like this—and now he knew what the Rimmers must have gone through—happened it was up to the lieutenants to die bravely and the sergeants to hold the desperate situation together long enough for the colonels to do the smart thing—which was stop and _think_ and come up with a new plan on the fly—even if it didn't endear them to their troops.

There wasn't time, however, for Lawson to listen to that little voice so he acknowledged its presence, then squashed it flat and went about doing his job.

"I really don't want to be a hero," Lawson muttered. "Aw hell…

"_Ironhawk_-Two-Two to any _Ironhawk _officer… shit. All _Ironhawks_. _Ironhawk_-Two-Two is assuming tactical control of the Troop. Mortars, offset and get us some cover fire. FiST, see if _Regulator_ is back up yet. Two-Four, do your job and cover Two-Three. _Ironhawk_-One, sort yourself out and…hell, action north. Establish yourself along the ridge-line to observe enemy reinforcements and set up a base of fire for us to work with."

Lawson's head smashed into the back of his seat hard enough to make his ears ring, but at least it meant that Cook was moving them around rather than leaving them a sitting target, for whatever that was worth. If they didn't break out and get mobile the battle armor was going to kill them. It was only a question of when, not if. _Patty_'s rear armor, less than two-thirds that of the front, was getting down to paper-thinness.

"Mechs!"

_What_? Lawson thought. This was followed by the observation that a scream of 'mechs!' was hardly proper radio procedure, but there was no more time for that particular lecture than there was to further contemplate _Thunder_-Six' current failings.

"Who said that?" Lawson demanded.

"_Killer_-Three-Five, mechs sighted scaling the wall west of my position."

Perfect, Lawson thought even as _Patty_ was rocked by a brace of SRMs slamming into its right side.

"_Thunder_-Six to all _Thunder_ elements. Prepare for phased withdrawal to the south-east. _Direcats_ are tail-end. _Hexapumas_ provide cover. _Killer_, wheel left anchored on _Lightning_ to deny enemy exposed flank."

As far as orders went it wasn't bad, Lawson acknowledged. It was a plain attempt to break contact but the vehicles were almost certainly faster than battle armor, and the _Direcat_s' lighter, faster-firing autocannons would be better for engaging the little bastards than the FIREGEMS were, especially since most were now out of beehive rounds.

The only problem with it, really, was that there were frigging BattleMechs between _Ironhawk_ and the proposed line of retreat.

"_Thunder_-Six, _Ironhawk_-Two-Two, we are unable—"

"Understood, Two-Two," the Colonel cut him off. "Break contact as best you see fit. _Hexapumas_ will provide cover with _long lance_ missile barrages. Be advised, the woofies are bringing in the rest of their battalion."

"Shit…_Thunder_, _Ironhawk_ will charge."

Pause.

"Are you insane, _Ironhawk_?" the tone was almost casual.

"We're cut off from you. _Ironhawk_ is on their outside flank. We'll cross the canal, they won't expect the ramps, and rake their flank as they cross. We'll circle around their formation to the east and we're home free. If necessary we go back in the canal and motor along the bottom until the engineers can put in another ramp or we hit the irrigation fields and can climb out on our own."

The mortar-tracks wouldn't like having to button up to deep-ford. Not only did it deny them their main gun, but closing up the mortar compartment and sealing it water-tight was a pain even when people weren't shooting at you. The fusion plants, of course, didn't need air, and the tracks all had some purely internal environmental in case they ran across a CBRN field so the crews wouldn't be affected.

"Good luck, _Ironhawk_…God's speed. _Thunder _clear."

"_Patty_, sound Rally, sound Action North …and then sound the Charge."

* * *

Lawson's helmeted head was slammed against something hard and, had he not been wearing his helmet, unforgiving. They hit the quasi-counterscarp and it felt as though the world had been dropped out from ahead of them as he was slammed into the restraint harness as they roared down the slope. Behind and to either side five more _Hexapuma_s, half again as many _Direcats_, a pair of mortar tracks, and one FiST came tearing down the embankment with him.

There was a terrific bang as _Patty_ was driven right into the center of a little cluster of the battle armored infantrymen. The tank tilted as its right track went up and over one of the men.

"And we're going to use their guts to grease the treads of our tanks!" Lawson cried over the noise.

Hutchins grinned and tossed him a thumb's up, then added: "Capacitor's charged."

"One last cannon round…there. Target enemy Mech."

"Target!"

"Up!"

"Shoot!"

"On-The-Way!" Hutchins sang over the roar of the gun.

"Button up! Reconfigure Beam!"

Lawson had shouted the first mostly as a warning. His crew had already been inside the tank with their hatches closed. Now, while Dewey watched the painfully slow reconfiguration, he checked his own board. All secure except for the gun. If that particle generator wasn't locked into position before the muzzle of the gun submerged, the tank would be flooded through the open breech.

Cook eased his throttle a little without being told, but they still hit the war at nearly fifty klicks per hour and threw up a huge plume of freshwater.

The coaxial mounted laser whined as Hutchins stitched a mech with the medium laser.

"Beam up!" the loader cried.

"Turret right."

The jerking took on an odd sideways movement as the turret spun and Lawson's direction of movement was to the left.

"Orders?" Hutchins asked.

"Wait for it," Lawson said. There was a lurch as the ground beneath the tracks disappeared, then he was slammed in his seat as they hit the bed of the canal. "Target Mech."

"Target!"

"Up!"

"Fire!"

An electric whine filled the turret as the PPC unleashed the stored charge in its capacitor into the legs of a war-machine. In Lawson's vision blocks beams of blue-white lightning crackled through the water as more _Hexapuma_s joined in the attack.

Lawnson turned back to his panel and brought up the tactical map, then turned his small troop upstream away from the mechs. The _Hexapumas_ took up the rear, the _Direcats_ with their autocannons useless underwater, racing ahead as the tanks turned their turrets in reverse to cover the movement. Another control brought up the controls to the remote-activated ramps and selected two.

The _Direcats_ swarmed up the ramp followed by the _Hexapumas_. Just before they reached the lip of the scarp they turned right to parallel it and twisted their turrets to look over the edge.

"Command, _Hawk_-One-Three, enemy is out of range."

"Get on the other side of that ridge," Lawson ordered as the mechs down in the canal had turned to engage them. "Put it between us and the guys in the canal. Mortars, target canal on the fly. FiST, get us some God-damned artillery cover!"

One tank cut ahead of the formation and abruptly stopped. The commander's hatch sprang up and a figure crawled out as Lawson rumbled past.

"One-Three. Stop and make pickup of abandoning crew. Gunner, _Warbler_."

"Target!"

"Up!"

"Fire!" Lawson barked and once again the capacitor-enhanced PPC whined. The last tank roared up over the ridge line and Lawson hit the control to deflate the ramp floats.

He twisted his vision block the other way. There was at least a reinforced company of mechs, plus battle armor heading their way. Their intention was clearly to pin him against the canal—or more precisely, the mechs and battle armor inside the canal—and destroy his little unit.

"Throttle up to troop best speed. _Direcats_, _Long Lance_ barrage north. Tanks engaged south to cover _Direcats_."

Each of the _Direcats _had two one-shot box launchers for _Long Lance_ missiles, and those hadn't been used in the initial exchange. Now the eight surviving cavalry fighting vehicles turned their turrets north and sixteen missiles were loosed towards the formation of mechs and battle armor that was clearly intending to catch _Ironhawk_ Troop in a nutcracker of ferro-fibrous armor, myomers and devastation.

"_Ironhawk_, _Ironhawk_-Six is resuming tactical command."

Lawson blinked. "Captain?" he blurted.

The radio control section of his consol flashed indicating a private band.

"_Hawk_-Two-Two," Lawson said.

"Report, Sergeant."

"Uh, down to eight _Direcats_ and looks like six _Hexapumas_, Sir, plus the mortar tracks and the FiST," Lawson said. "As of yet no arty support. _Direcats_ have expended all _Long Lances_. _Hexapumas_ have mixed stocks repeating. And with all due respect where the hell—"

"Equipment casualty, they got my radios."

"I saw a cat-kill," Lawson said. "If you're alive, who got their top popped?"

"Lieutenant Chandraskar."

_Pity_, Lawson thought, _I sort of liked the XO_. "We got cut off from _Thunder_. They're conducting an organized withdrawal under fire to the south-west. I planned to loop around and go mobile."

"I like it," the Captain said instantly. "Okay, here's what we're going to do…" the radio shifted over to a troop-wide setting. "_Ironhawk_, continue as briefed. _Direcats_, target enemy battle armor to the south. Tanks have got the mechs. Report magazine status…"

Lawson went back to keeping track of the remains of his platoon as the Captain shifted _Hexapumas_ with remaining _Long Lance_ stocks to the north. For now only those tanks had a weapon that could reach the inexorably approaching enemy. Meanwhile, the _Direcats_ put down interlocking fields of autocannon fire to keep the battle armor from charging up the scarp and repeating their earlier attack.

_This insane maneuver might just be survivable after all,_ he thought with small smile of satisfaction.


	19. Chapter 16

**Chapter 16**

Star Captain Latharn Fetladral watched the tactical display in stony silence. The battle was long since over and there was only one logical destination for the BattleMechs that had already destroyed two trinaries with contemptuous ease. The use of artillery might be a technical fault, but none of the rockets had actually carried live warheads aside from the half-dozen incendiary rounds that had done nothing more than briefly shut down one star of OmniMechs.

It was the kind of issue that could be argued either way. The artillery had been used to develop the terrain for one side—and the terrain fought on was the choice of the defender just as the time of battle was the choice of attacker—but had refrained from inflicting damage. The Clans lacked the warheads used, there had never been a point to develop such weapons. But just because the Clans lacked them did not mean that they were dishonorable weapons. If they had, then the Clans would have been forced to use second-line BattleMechs with Star League-era weapons.

"How much longer before the minimum requisite facilities have been rebuilt to launcher aerospace fighters and aerodyne DropShips?" he asked.

"I can have a section of runway and a catapult rigged six hours for the fighters, but they will have to be low-weight launches, and I will have to strike the launcher and rig trap-cables if they are to land. Erecting the launcher and then replacing it with cables will take time and people and lengthen the time required to finish more extensive repairs. A section of runway long enough for full-weight self-powered takeoffs will require twelve, perhaps as much as fourteen hours. A section for the DropShips is dependant on type of DropShip.

"At best? Two local days to have good runways in, and that assumes no further attacks, I run my repairs crews including the locals at maximum effort, and that the damage is no worse than we believe it to be."

"That long?" despite his best effort Latharn was unable to keep the surprise from his voice. The damage had been extensive, but it had happened mostly to the structures. The runway had appeared only slightly cratered. How long would it take to fill in a few holes?

"I have little faith I can manage even that, Star Captain," the technician replied. "I am going to have to give the spheroids some rest breaks if I do not want their productivity to seriously decline. Mistakes that we can ill-afford the time to correct will creep into their work if I do not," he grimaced, "and then only if we continue to pay them at their 'over-time rates', otherwise the 'mistakes' might not be accidental."

Latharn nodded. With more time on his hands than any except perhaps the warriors of the Third Battle Cluster, he had already become sufficiently familiar with the Spheroids' pervasive greed that was not confined to the upper tiers of the petty-lords the way he had assumed. It was an attitude that still took many of the Clans by surprise. The Krispy Kats would have simply had the Spheroids lashed with a neural whip, but Khan Ulric Kerensky had declaired that such measures would only stir up resentment. Resentment, in turn, would spawn insurrection and geurilla movements. Better, at least for now, to cause minimal disruption to the lives of the civilians of the Inner Sphere. They would have to learn proper behavior eventually, but that could wait until Earth had been liberated and the Star League had been remade under the auspecies of Clan Wolf.

He refrained from commenting on this, however. Instead he returned to the topic of discussion. "The damage does not appear to be that extensive," he said mildly.

"Oh the Spheroids did minimum damage to the runway's surface," the other man acknowledged, "but they used deep-penetrating non-explosive-munitions. Possibly some kind of vibro-bomb variant. I am taking detailed records for the scientists, maybe they can figure out how it did what it did.

"The damage to the sub-surface strata, and especially the water-draining layer, is extensive. The latter is especially important given the local water table and ground saturation levels. Without repair the runway could well collapse underneath the stress of takeoff or landing."

Latharn nodded again, forcing himself to remember that the man next to his was, like Latharn, in a sort of virtual Siberia. Latharn commanded the Silver Keshik's artillery binary. The artillery stars were often the first units bid away, if they were ever bid in the first place, and only rarely saw combat. If he was lucky he might be able to win a Trial of Position to command a line trinary, perhaps even a cluster. If he was unlucky he would stay in his current position until he was transferred to a _solahma_ unit.

The man next to him had failed his Trial of Position to an Elemental unit only by the simple bad luck of a rare mechanical failure. Instead of being a warrior he had been trained as an architect, and then rose to lead a team of technicians trained to build field-fortifications and other necessary structures inside of combat zones.

At least, Latharn thought, the other man was actually allowed to fulfill his purpose.

"No," he said. "Have a mobile crane rigged. We will lift as many fighters as possible into launch-cradles of the spherical DropShips that have them. Have the fighters disengage all of their pods first; they can refuel and rearm inside of the DropShips. Do not rig a catapult or trap-cables. However, I will need some of your engineers to modify the surrounding port facilities to better suit the coming battle."

"Yes, Sir," the tech barked and left to rally his construction crews.

* * *

"Bravo-One." MechWarrior Teery commanded Star Captain Latharn Fetladral's second star. By all rights the warrior should have been promoted Star Commander when he was assigned the post. He certainly would have if he had been given one of the line stars. But the artillery stars were beneath the notice of most warriors so the promotion had never came. Using the warrior's position identifier instead of his rank was not much more than a token effort, but it was a token that cost Fetladral nothing.

The radio crackled.

"One, go Command."

"Have the binary load FASCAMs and take them out. Head northeast. I will transmit deployment packages for the minefields shortly. Speed is of the essence, Teery. We must lay as many minefields as quickly as possible. We will start further out. Use up all of your missiles, and then come back and reload. Do you understand?"

"Aff!" Teery said excitedly. "I understand! The binary is moving now. Will you not accompany us, Star Captain?"

"Neg. I must oversee the StarPort's defenses. When the enemy is closer and battle is soon to be joined I will come," Latharn said. Besides, his _Gargoyle_ was not an artillery mech and would add nothing to their efforts at this point in time.

He closed the channel and called up Alpha-two. His second point was a good, tough, level-headed warrior who understood that the reality of artillery stars was to win battles, not glory. Just the kind of person needed to make sure that the excitable Teery did not take his newfound freedom too far.

A third channel was rewarded by the response of his personal tech. "Bjoel," he said. "I need you to pull the autocannons and SRM packs from my OmniMech. I want a custom weapons fit. A large laser and a pair of mediums in the right arm, an ultra-20 autocannon in the left. I want two tons of ammo for the cannon, a laser anti-missile system, and I want one of those prototype lightweight target acquisition gear modules pulled from storage."

"That module is still years away from reaching production readiness," Bjoel warned him. "The six we carry were probably put on our spares list by accident. They are not even rated for field trials yet."

"Accident or no, we have them and might as well use them," Latharn said. "Can you mount it?"

"Am I not the greatest technician in Clan Wolf?" Bjoel asked, feigning hurt. "It will be mounted, Star Captain, but without a pod-interface removing it will require a great deal of effort. Also, it will not be as robust as a properly designed full-scale combat unit. I will install an extra circuit breaker to reduce the chances of a point failure compromising your OmniMech's entire power grid. But a solid hit, one that does not even penetrate perhaps, stands a good chance of knocking it out."

"Good, because I want you to set up a reconfiguration of Alpha Star's _Nagas_. Right now all of the binary's _Nagas_ are –Prime configured. I was Alpha Star reconfigured into _Naga-_Bravos, and pull the small laser and replace with the EL-TAG modules."

"Shall I prepare for a similar reconfiguration of Bravo-star's _Nagas_?"

"No, but lay out the pods and equipment for a minimum-time conversion to the Alpha-standard configuration. I will designate a score of firing positions, make certain that reloads of their missile packs are pre-deployed and awaiting them. Also, I need you to load as many FASCAM reloads as you can onto trucks with the equipment needed for rapid field re-loading. Enough for one reloading is sufficient for now, but more will be needed in the extremely near future."

"Understood," Bjoel said, but he hesitated.

"Is there a problem, Technician, quineg?"

"Neg, Star Captain," Bjoel said. "But are these conversion authorized?"

It was an impertinent question, but Latharn understood his tech's anxiety. _Naga_ pilots preferred the _Naga_-Bravo varient, but were seldom allowed to use it. The rearming and customization of what was widely regarded as a dishonorable OmniMech was considered shameful and a waste of resources. If he had gone to saKhan Garth Radick about it permission would have almost certainly been refused.

In his own way, Bjoel was very highly regarded. His service team could swap out pods or repair damage faster than almost any other in all of Clan Wolf. He was an able administrator of his technical service teams and skilled at finding necessary components even when they were in short supply. His custom cockpit configurations were widely regarded as having been a determining factor in at least three Bloodname trials including the one that Latharn had won for the Fetladral bloodname. And unlike many technicians who, at best, worked _for_ warriors, Bjoel liked working _with_ warriors. The three years they had been together had allowed them to create a very effective team.

The tech, Latharn knew**, **had deduced his intentions from the pod configurations he had asked that Bjoel prepare. Now he was slipping into the role that Teery should have held. Not so much questioning Latharn's plans, but offering a contrasting viewpoint. If the man had been a warrior he could have done it directly, but he was only a technician. Since he could not question the plan in regards to the enemy, he had brought it up in the only venue he could, the view of a tech asked to do something that Clan Wolf largely did not allow.

"I have recieved no orders from the saKhan against rearming the _Naga_s as I see fit," Latharn said. "Rearming them will make best use of the resources I have available to me for the defense of the StarPort."

Bjoel nodded once. An acknowledgement that both knew that his commander had given _him_ an excuse, but had also failed to cover himself. Well, the best sort of cover was victory, and Latharn had no intention of losing.

Bjoel's face disappeared from the small communications screen and Latharn turned back to the tactical map.

The saKhan's carefully devised op-plan had sunk hopeless into chaos. New, unexpected weapons had been unleashed with total surprise. The failure to account for the proper dimensions of the canal had resulted in the enemy having far more cohesion than called for in the first confrontation. The wave meant to sweep up their flank had run into a wall of unusually long-ranged missiles with very powerful warheads, but that had been the only real intelligence planning-failure to date. There simply was not information available about these other forces aside from the rumors that they were a long-lost SLDF force that had been placed in cryo-stasis in anticipation of the Exiles' return.

Despite the setbacks Clan Wolf was not without victory. Nearly a battalion of hover-armor had been destroyed while executing hit-and-fade raids, many in a clever devised ambush by hidden Elementals. Their aerospace forces were reduced to defensive missions while operating inside an umbrella of anti-aircraft surface fire. It was sufficient to stand off further attacks until the runways were repaired, but little more. They must have lost at least a third of the armor they had brought.

And none of that touched upon the regimental combat team of the Avalon Hussars that had been stationed on this world and had been reduced to supporting this '3d Cavalry'.

The worst losses, really had to have been the recent destruction of two trinaries, and even that must have been at high cost to the battle armor that had been reported by Star Commander Blada Neely. In all likelihood the few survivors had sought shelter in that old wreck that had been reported in the intelligence dump from her DI. A clever move from an enemy that had repeatedly shown itself capable of clever moves, and had reduced the forces against it to one reinforced trinary.

And, of course one Star Captain Latharn Fetladral's artillery binary and the DropShips and OmniFighters he was protecting.

"Replay last specified action sequence," he ordered.

The tac-map obediently blanked, then brought up the short battle that had just been fought west of Dantron Meander. The quality was quite poor, the smoke and flares had greatly degraded the performance of orbiting satellites. The DIs had been unable to establish proper telemetry links which meant their take was of inferior quality. Their batroms were, of course, unavailable. Still, with much editing and filtering some semblance of what must have happened was determinable. And there were, of course, the ECM signals which were captured in great quantity and could be analyzed.

"Their armor is very good," he noted. Well, the maximum amount of armor a mech could carry for its weight never really changed. The formulas were ancient and despite the best efforts of many, had yet to be worked around. Even after more than two centuries the Clans could not put more protection on a OmniMech than their ancestors in the SLDF could have for their BattleMechs. The best that could be hoped for was to reduce the mass of that protection, to make it lighter and stronger while keeping the increased bulk down. These people likely had accomplished just that.

"Speed is excellent," he added. Possibly even better than those of the same weight-class in use by the Clans, although he would let the scientists make _that_ call. "Super-light engines, perhaps…or super-chargers and this new type of myomer that some BattleMechs have been observed to use.

"Weapons seem to mostly lag the Clans, but they have a highly developed autocannon." More than one. There was the adaptable weapon that they armed their tanks with, and also the rapid-fire weapon on their armored cavalry vehicles. "And make extensive use of ECM."

The jamming patterns used so far would be analyzed and downloaded to his binary and the fighters. It would make those patterns much less useful against him, but they would use other patterns that they had not yet used.

"We are far more closely matched in BattleMechs of similar weights than we have been against other forces in the Inner Sphere. Engagement against a BattleMech of greater mass, especially of thirty tons or more, will likely become a losing engagement and should be avoided."

If only the Arrow-launchers on his _Nagas_ could be dismounted. On the old _Woodsman_s that had been used to develop the system they could have been, but not on the newer artillery OmniMechs.

Still, he had a plan that was fairly flexible and should stand him in good order. Better yet, they had detached their dedicated artillery units. He may very well win this, and wouldn't _that_ be something in his codex?

* * *

Captain's Briefing Room  
SLS _Texas_ (BB-35)

Of the ten people in the conference room, seven wore uniforms—four of them variants of each other, while the last three were all individual representations. All of the people in the room looked tired, and most held drink bulbs, the kind that were insulated and intended for hot drinks like tea or coffee, but were opaque and so could just as easily hold something alcoholic.

The door slid open and a woman wearing the service dress uniform of the Black Watch drifted in. Instead of the normal kilt the uniform usually required, she wore the tartan-pattered trews used by that unit when operating in microgravity. She glanced around once, then a slight shove of a foot drifted her to the right so that two more people could enter.

The first was a girl, not yet out of her teens, wearing a pure white ship-suit with gold trim. The second was a boy who could not have been any older, but the life-support frame he was encased in, coupled with deeply-etched pain lines and hair that was thinning prematurely from medications, gave him the aura of advanced age.

The girl drifted across the room to take up a seat in the chair at the head of the table and fastened the lap-belt to hold her in place with the easy skill of a person who had done the same thing two dozen times a day for years. The boy's frame puffed along, ducted propellers sending it gliding across the room, stopped, turned, and drifted down to the chair to the girl's left that didn't match the rest of the chairs in the room. A clicking sound echoed in the compartment as the frame locked itself in place.

The doors slid shut again, and then the woman in uniform pushed herself across the room to hover to the right of and behind the girl.

"Sit."

"Ma'am, I—"

"Liz," the girl cut the woman off without raising her voice, but clearly making the name an order. "Sit," she repeated, indicating the chair to her right.

She waited while 'Liz' sat and strapped in. Drink bulbs were distributed. The routine of sealing the doors and double-checking their electronic security was played out.

Finally she nodded, sipped from the drink bulb, then pressed its contact surface to the hook-and-loop surface on the table, sticking it in place. "Let us begin. General Winters," she said, turning to the military commander of Task Force TH-X1138, "you are to be commended on your quick-thinking."

Winters grimaced. "Military training is a great asset when it comes to making quick decisions when things go wrong. That said, I don't think any of my instructors at the Point could have anticipated anything quite like this, ma'am."

"According to initial reports, General, there isn't a Star League anymore," the girl said sardonically. "And I am sure that I'm well near the bottom in line of succession for the Director-Generalship. Under the circumstance you can call me Amanda."

"There isn't a Hegemony left for there to be a Director-General of…Ma'am," Winters said. At another time he might have smiled at the long-running joke. Not today.

"_What_?" Amanda's voice cracked like a whip. The people who had already been in the room winced as her reaction reminded them of their own when they had first learned it.

"After…well, after the war the House Lords stripped Kerensky of his Protectorship. He kept control of the SLDF while they debated on who would be the new First Lord, and then ended up disbanding the Star League a few years later."

"I can understand why we weren't suggested for the job," Amanda said wryly, "but what about the other survivors? Simon, James…that fat bastard didn't get _all_ of us."

"We don't know," Winters said. "The commander of the 41st has provided us with a historical timeline and a lot of background, but scholarly articles aren't something a military unit generally carries around with it. Further, Planting is an Agri-world. What universities it has are focused towards planting crops and managing livestock, not historical research. As it is we're still wading through the general information he's provided us."

"Okay," Amanda said quickly. "Let's hear it, then."

"Kerensky ultimately decided to…leave the Inner Sphere, I guess. Officially his reasoning, for the few records available, was to keep the SLDF out of the war that everyone saw coming over who was going to rule the Inner Sphere next. It seems…highly likely that he plundered the Hegemony for supplies, then he…left." Winters hesitated, "and he took something like eighty percent of the then-existing SLDF and their dependants with him. His fleet was last seen near Samarkand and that was the last anyone has seen of it."

"Not surprising, I suppose," one of the civilians said into the tense silence that followed.

"It sure as hell surprises _me_," Murakama said flatly.

"Admiral," Amanda said sharply. She sighed, then began again. "Kerensky has, _had_—I suppose we're all going to be some time in coping with the sudden change," she said with a weak smile before turning back to Murakama. "As I was saying, he had his strong points, but one of his strongest was also his weakest." She looked across at Christine McCay, her tutor and, effectively, Chief of Staff, who had first spoken.

McCay nodded and made a small go-ahead gesture and Amanda turned back to the SLDF admiral, the only person in the compartment wearing a regular SLDF uniform.

"He was just too damn loyal to the Star League for its own good," Amanda said bitterly. "The Lords of the Star League—the Star League itself, in his mind—told him go off and play with his toy army men like a good little boy instead of doing his job as Regent, and that is _exactly_ what he did…and so became indirectly responsible for the last fourteen years or more. They told him to sit back and let the real people decide what to do with the Star League, and he did just that. If the Star League had faced an outside threat he would have gone charging after it like a bull after a piece of rag someone flapped in its face, but _hell_ if he was going to let the SLDF be the instrument that destroyed the Star League.

"The SLDF indoctrination programs worked too well on him. When the Hegemony needed him he thought about it _exactly_ the same way he thought about the Draconis Combine or the Free Worlds' League, which is about as much as the average person contemplates their spleen. "

Murakama raised an eyebrow. "Don't you think that's a bit harsh? I mean, if he was that loyal to the Star League why not find another Cameron? As you said, there were other survivors."

"No." The word was delivered in a very rough, dry rasp and Murakama turned to the boy in the life-support frame with some surprise. He spoke only rarely in these meetings, and then almost always used a voc-corder. It was maybe the third time she had heard him use his normal voice. "It was not too harsh," he continued, "and he would not find another Cameron."

He reached up to the collar around his neck and touched a stud. A warm, but mechanical, baritone issued from it as the boy's lips moved ever so slightly.

"He wouldn't have trusted another Cameron," the voice said softly, as he looked at Amanda who nodded grimly. He turned back to Murakama, "not after we counter-signed the death warrants for those…people who admitted to attempting to assassinate General Jackson because of…his cousin. I think we all know it was on 'Uncle Alek's' orders…not that he'd ever admit it."

He slumped back in the frame and closed his eyes. "Kerensky was tired old man, Admiral," the voice said, disconcertingly energetic for the young man in the frame. "I can sympathize, believe me.

"The truth is that had he been anyone else or the situation been not so desperately dire, he would have retired long before the start of the Hegemony campaign. His command choices over the last years were erratic at best. It was unnecessary to stop and take each planet, and greatly contributed to the Usurper's mental collapse and the devastation he wrought in his last years. Seizing those planets necessary to maintain our lines of communication, of strategic importance, and necessary to blockade Earth, would have been sufficient. With their leader dead the rest would have had no choice but to surrender.

"His choices during the European Theater had little to do with the most efficient employment of the Star League Defense Force and everything to do with getting to his family. This resulted in no less than two entire BattleMech _corps_—plus their support unites—getting bogged down outside of Moscow in one of the worst Russian winters in history while the rest of the invasion force was forced to confront a concentration of units that defied the mission planners' expectations. Expectations generated mostly because they were what _he_ expected to face around Moscow, and who had the sense to be elsewhere.

"There are a plethora of examples over the last decade where once he made a decision he pressed on with it. Incurring damage and casualties, and wasting time, when altering his approach would have yielded greater gains at lesser cost in blood and treasure."

He lapsed into silence, and Amanda, after squeezing her brother's hand, reached over and switched the device off. She watched the diagnostic screen built into the life-support frame for several seconds then nodded once to herself and sat back in her chair.

"So he mutinied," Jim Halliday said grimly.

"No," Murakama said in a bleak voice. "Mutiny is an unlawful act on the part of the crew. Barratry is criminal conduct on the part of a ship's officers."

"Whichever," the Marine said dismissively. "The point is he deserted and encouraged in desertion and—"

"Stop!"

He slowly turned and looked at Amanda. "What?" She raised an eyebrow. "Ma'am?" the word came out with a jerk as he straightened in his chair.

"I suppose talking about the exact motivations and what actions Kerensky took will be a matter of discussion for years to come," Amanda said. "In all likelihood they have already _been_ a topic of discussion for years. We will not spend any more time on this now. General Winters, I believe you were giving us a brief synopsis of the past two and a half centuries?"

"Yes, ma'am," he said then paused. Amanda smiled slightly and he gave her a slight nod, acknowledging that this time the title hadn't been a mere customary honorific.

"There have been at least four major multi-sided wars. Easily twice that number of smaller two-sided conflicts, possibly more. And an impossible to determine number of lesser incidents, raids, counter-raids, rebellions, and the like. The former Terran Hegemony was been split up between the five houses and plundered very early on for much of its technological wealth. The Ares Conventions were pretty much tossed out the airlock. I haven't come across any references to bio-warfare, but chemical, nuclear, and orbital kinetic weapons were all used against planets.

"Technological decline was…immense. I don't have a lot of statistics, but the few examples I have to work with are deeply troubling. The Inner Sphere, to the best of Felix Steiner's knowledge, no longer has any jump-capable warships. In fact, it seems as though they are unable to even _construct_ any new KF jump-capable vessels of any type. Destruction of even one such vessel is now considered a war crime punishable by death. Ironically the century or so has seen a slide back towards the Ares Conventions because the situation has become so precarious due to the loss of advanced technologies."

Looks were traded in the tense silence that filled the compartment. After a few seconds, however, one of the civilians began to impatiently tap a data-slate.

Amanda fixed him with a frosty look, then turned to Winters. "Terra?" she asked, not expecting much hope. If there was any world that was going to be fought heavily over for its technological resources—let alone the sheer morale advantage it would give the House that occupied it—it was going to be the birthplace of humanity.

_Home_ was probably a still-smoldering radioactive cinder.

"Intact, actually," Winters said. "The last Lords of the Star League appointed Jerry Blake to be the Director of the Communications Ministry. He established it as a neutral organization, and they maintain all of the HPG stations throughout the Inner Sphere with the entirety of the Sol System as their Headquarters. Apparently shortly after taking control Blake changed the name to ComStar, and today they are some sort of techno-religious cult."

"I thought Jerome was agnostic?" Amanda said.

"He is, _was_," the woman sitting next to her said. "At least he was when last we spoke. I suppose he could have undergone some kind of conversion after General Kerensky deser…left."

"Yes, well, now he is apparently the center of their religious practices," Winters said, glancing at his own data-slate. "They dress in robes, invoke the 'Blessed Blake' whenever they have to fix something or even work with anything vaguely technological, and are very, very insular. They also have what is widely considered one of the best clandestine services which acts as an internal police force. This agency is also believed to conduct information gathering and covert paramilitary operations throughout the rest of the Inner Sphere. They claim neutrality, but Steiner says that they tend to be neutral in favor of whoever they like best or offers something that they want.

"To date we have been unable to communicate with the local HPG station aside from a robotic signal that says the station is off-line. Exterior imaging shows no sign of damage or anything that would keep the station from working."

Carson raised his drink bulb slightly and drawled, "Colonel Chaffee says, an' I agree, that it would be possible to force our entrance to the station. It don't appear t' be guarded by any of the sonsabitches—your pardon, ma'am—and what local forces are in the area are 'spected to be light. But we don' think it's a good idea at this time."

There were nods from the others at the table.

"In recent terms the Davions and Steiners have formed a political union by marriage," Winters said. "So far it looks to be fairly stable and they now control a stretch of space that spans the breadth of the Inner Sphere. Unfortunately it is in the invasion vector that these 'Clans' are coming from. The Rasalhague sector also recently broke from the Draconis Combine to form the Free Rasalhague Republic. The FRR is also getting hit hard by the woofies. The last of the invasion force is on the far side of that, tearing up the Draconis Combine.

"Several decades ago a Star League-era memory core was recovered and since then the Inner Sphere has enjoyed something of a technological renaissance. But the Inner Sphere is still vastly inferior in every category except for sheer numbers, compared to the Clans. This concludes the historical brief. Admiral Murakama?"

"I have been in communication with one Star Commodore Genevieve Ch'in," Murakama said. "Most of it is very polite chit-chat, but I have discovered some things."

"Anything interesting?" Winters asked.

"One thing, well, two, but the second is more of a linguistic quirk," Murakama said. "I don't think English is their primary language."

"Why not?" Amanda asked. "I have listened to the tapes of General Winters' conversation with their Khan and didn't notice anything that would suggest that."

"Well, for one their accent is pure high court," Murakama said. "Second, they don't seem to use contractions. I know that those who learn certain other languages first often have problems with contractions. The accent suggests that they learned from teaching programs."

"It didn't seem to confuse Radick when I talked to him," Winters said.

"I don't think it does," Murakama said. "I think it…annoys or insults them more than anything else. They consider it rude."

"Your second point?" Winters asked.

"That _was_ my second point. My first point is that they consider the use of nukes in very bad taste," Murakama said. "I wasn't able to get if they ban them amongst themselves by convention, but they certainly do so by mutual agreement. I don't think I can emphasize enough how poorly they'd consider someone who does use them."

Winters considered that for a moment. "In that case, Admiral, since it's usually your bailiwick, I think I'm going to suggest that we ban the use of all nuclear weapons under all situations for at least the immediate future. If they consider any use like we would consider orbital bombardment of a city, for example, let's play by their rules…for the time being."

"Agreed," Amanda said, glancing around the table as though challenging anyone to defy her. None did. "In that case, Admiral Murakama, the status of the task force naval component?"

"Problematic," Murakama said. She touched the control station at her place at the table and the lights dimmed somewhat as the holoprojectors in the table and the ceiling activated. A globe filled with ships appeared hovering in the middle of the room.

"This is the task force before the jump," she said. "Train in the center, then the Nessies, the transports, and finally the escorts. Normally when we jump we maintain our relative positions. When we jumped this time, _this_ is what happened."

The image shifted, the neat, orderly formation was thrown into chaos. Off in the fringes of the holo, well outside the formation near the very edge of the holo-field, was a brightly colored semi-spherical shape that coded a high-energy burst of various EM radiations. A sidebar indicated the projection had been skewed to include it, and its actual distance was estimated to be nine light-minutes away, give or take up to five percent. A golden point of light appeared near the center of the formation, but noticeably off-set to one side.

After a moment the second imaged flattened so that both images appeared, both with the off-center golden light icon.

"This," Murakama said, using a light wand to indicate the golden point of light, "was the epicenter of the phenomena. Those vessels closest to it and most massive had their relative locations altered the least. Those further out and massing least suffered a greater degree of drift in their positions."

A rough, off-center sphere appeared in the upper display, encompassing most, but not all of the ships. A similar display encompassed all of the ships in the lower sphere.

"_Tradewind_, _Wayfarer_, and _Vulcan_ from the Nessies, SLS _Prometheus_," Murakama recited, a cluster of four ships near the center of the formation lit up in both holos. "The largest and most central had almost no drift. The Nessies _Ark Royal_ and _Lexington_, the transport SLS _Birkenhead_," more light codes blinked on and in the lower 'after' display, red pinpricks attached to ships by red lines to show a minimal amount of drift associated with the higher-massing vessels. "_Hood_," Murakama continued, "was centrally located as well to cut the lightspeed-lag to a minimum."

She paused briefly. "The Nessies had the interior escort duty, they came though physically intact but apparently some of their more advanced electronics were more vulnerable than we were to the effects of the miss-jump. They can still tie into offensive/defensive fire-control nets, but it'll be _Hood_'s computers calling the shots. _Lex_ reports that their fighters are good to go in an emergency, but both of the carriers have lost their landing and fighter recovery systems, as well as the fighter command network. If they have to launch, it'll be without guidance from the carriers.

"_Prometheus_ is operational again, but since they can't jump with the bay in use, work on the Nessies has been put on hold. On a side note, all ships are reporting green on their KF-drives, but I have teams of suited engineers who are going to go take an up-close look at the Nessies just to double-check.

"The Fleet Train was central and it came through more or less in one piece. We still have some reoccurring electrical glitches that are being chased down. _Mercy_ had enough redundancy built into her that her capabilities were unimpaired. SLS _Daniel McCallum_ is reduced to a max burn of 1 _G_ for the time being, and SLS _Dromedary_ had a tank-temperature incident and vented two full fuel bunkers. We were already low on fuel reserves, this accounted for almost twenty percent of our remaining reserves. Our ships have enough on-board fuel, for the moment, but resupply will be a necessity in the near future.

"The transport group also came through in one piece," Murakama pressed on. "The ships were lighter and further out from the nexus, as my staff astrogator is calling it, so they suffered more drift compared to the innermost and heaviest units, and they also suffered more problems. Operationally their captains report that they are good to maneuver, but don't have the degree of confidence in their targeting systems to feel comfortable with even limited orbital fire support.

"Given what General Winters told us about the Inner Sphere I thought I'd bring this up. Our participation in naval combat during the First and Second Battles of Sol was restricted to mopping up operations, so our transport group came through intact. The same can't be said for General Winters' ground force. The result is that we have a lot of extra transportation capability. That's a potentially very valuable asset, if the Inner Sphere really is lacking for KF jump-capable ships, and the fact that they're armed makes it only more so."

"A point," one of the civilians said. He leaned forward, using one hand to flick down the reading-glasses that had been perched on top of his head, and queried his data-slate. "Definitely a point."

"What of our escorts, Admiral Murakama-_sama_?" asked a woman wearing an orange-trimmed white uniform. Her black hair was pulled back in a severe braid, and a black wave emblem was out of place on the breast of her uniform. None of the others in the room could see it, but they knew that the emblem of the Draconis Combine was cloaked in black satin, and that the _saya_ for her _daisho_ were empty, in deference to the security personnel.

"As I said, we have the Nessies, _Chu-sa_ Takamori," Murakama told the junior-most officer present. "The carriers _Lexington_ and _Ark Royal_, the heavy cruisers _Surprise_ and _Nike_, the frigates _Victory_ and _Constitution_, along with all of their dropships, in one squadron; a destroyer squadron with _Terrible_, _Cerberus_, _Stalwart_, _Peregrine_, _Thermopylae_ and _Vanguard_ in it; and finally _Orkid_, _Spooky_, and _Lolita_.

"Our main escort group, however, did not come through with us," Murakama admitted. "Whether those outside of this sphere," she gestured at the two holos, "were left behind, or if something else happened to them, we just don't know."

"We still have two of the _Mako_-class bomb-ketches, _Harvey_ and _Moth_, left," spoke up the man sitting across from the Combine officer. He wore a black uniform that was ragged with where buttons, unit insignia, and other bright-work had been stripped from the cloth. Not as part of a ritual humiliation following a court martial, but self-inflicted in shame by what had been done by the rest of the military that he had once belonged to.

"Yes, but they are best suited for orbital fire support, Jackson," Murakama said in deference to the other man's desire to avoid using his family name. "We retain _Hood_, of course, and DesRon 23—_Holland_, _Kidd_, _Lütjens_, _Nishimura_, _Phillips_, _Scott_, and _Yamaguchi_, are all _Wodehouse_-variant _Lola-III_-class destroyers, and the _Busby_-type _Riga_-class destroyer leaders _White _and _Moon_—which was part of the escort force the Black Watch had built for the _Tirpitz_. Further, because of the shape of the…distortion field, I suppose we're calling it, we have four units from the inner part of the outer defense cordon. Three of them are heavy cruisers—_Salamander_ and _Black Jack_, both of the _Luxor_-class, and SLS _Heinlein_, which is one of the three _Asimov_-class prototypes that were built for the same design competition that the _Luxor_ won. The fourth ship is one of the Black Watch-rebuilt _Whirlwind_s, SLS _T.C. McQueen_

"_McQueen_ was at the very edge of the phenomena and has extensive faults throughout the ship. Her KF-drive shows green on diagnostics, but it's about the only system that is. Two-thirds of her crew were transferred to _Mercy_ suffering from TDS-symptoms so severe that they are crippling. That number includes most of he senior officers, her skipper is in a coma, the Chief Engineer is dead, the XO and weapons officer have both been tanked."

"Who's in charge of her then?" Winters asked.

"A jig—that is, lieutenant, junior grade—who was her communications officer. Her senior surviving lieutenant currently is half-buried in what's left of her life-support and can't be spared from that duty. A couple of teams from _Prometheus_ should be transferring over…right about now, actually," Murakama said, consulting her data-slate

."Do we need to consider scuttling her?" Amanda asked quietly after a moment of contemplation.

"No," Murakama said. "That…contingency has already been anticipated. If we have to we can, but until that time, or the team from _Prometheus_ say she's done for…"

"Agreed," Amanda said quickly.

"Combat capability?" Winters asked.

"Most of the Nessies can form line as long as we handle fire-control for them," Murakama said. "They have weapons, but otherwise they don't have the eyes to find targets, all of their electronic warfare capability is down, and their damage control capability is likely compromised, perhaps severely so. Some of that can be repaired with time in the yard. Some of it, especially the electronic warfare grid which as far as I know no one was cleared to know anything about, will be more problematic.

"_Hood_ came through pretty lightly. We're combat-capable even though our fighter launching systems are down. _Harvey_ and _Moth_ were both in formation on _Birkenhead_ and are functional, but as General Jackson pointed out, they're best at supporting landing operations. DesRon 23 is a mixed bag of good and bad, say 40-percent capable overall. The cruisers are going to take some time."

"I think what Dick is trying to ask is can they take if us they decide to get all frisky?" Carson asked.

"A _Black Lion_ can take a bit of killing, General," Murakama said coolly. "I suppose it depends on targeting selection. If we can intercept we can kill it, but with the extensive system casualties we won't be doing it as fast or as clean as we would otherwise. Any fighter cover we have will have to come from the embarked units. Even with our system failures, however, we retain far more offensive capability than a single battlecruiser possesses.

"So no, General, they can't 'take us' with what they have in-system, but I would be very wary about trying to take them with as many problems as we're facing. If it comes to it we are likely to be hurt very badly."

"Next order of business then," Amanda said. "The ground situation. General Carson?"

"Right now it's stalemated," Carson said, he still drawled slightly, but the earlier accent had vanished, replaced by the serious tone he now used. "The woofies are able to achieve local superiority, but when they do Chaffee, and this Steiner chap, are able to break contact more or less successfully, and set up again somewhere else.

"That is not to say there haven't been losses. Their equipment is good. Better than in general service in the SLDF, and better than most Royal-grade stuff too. In some cases a _lot_ better, especially in the realm of energy weapons. The initial engagement south of one of the irrigation canals was devastating to Chaffee's third squadron, and its gotten hammered repeatedly since. The _Hexapuma_ battle tanks simply don't have a rapid enough rate of fire to be effective against their battle armor. The use of certain specialty rounds has helped offset this, but it doesn't make them truly effective close-in.

"The one-shot anti-armor weapon that the troops call 'the Pill' is effective against the battle armor, but it requires the individual troopers to expose themselves. Unfortunately since we never got it to really work against conventional armor, we don't have a lot of them and we're rapidly burning through the stocks we have. Further, it appears only weapons fired inside rather narrow engagement arcs and truly effective.

"We captured a number of troops, including battle armor, and we captured intact one of the big mechs that we designate _Wreckingballs_ and Steiner calls a _Mad Cat_. Analysis will take some time, but it'll hopefully provide us with some good news."

"What about the air-raid on the spaceport?" Liz asked.

"Effective, but costly, Colonel," Winters replied, keying his own dataslate. "The primary attack cost the Hussars almost all of their fighters, and the better part of the attack troop Chaffee sent to escort them. For this they savaged one Wolf fighter squadron, cratered the runways, destroyed a number of hangers, blew up a fuel dump though not the main hydrogen farm, and blew up at least one ammunition dump.

"The secondary strike failed to engage the Wolf command post. The resulting aerial fight resulted in the destruction of two more attack troops at a cost of another of the Wolf fighter squadrons."

"That's the bad news, I hope," McCay said.

"Not at all, Doc," Carson told Amanda's Chief of Staff. "We met in battle. Both sides felt each other out. They know a little bit more about us and our capabilities than they did, and we know a little bit more about them and theirs. For example, we now know that they can use their mechs as movers for battle armor in a sort of adapted dragoon doctrine."

"So?"

"So that means that they've done something really fancy to their gyros."

"You mean we can't do it?" Christine asked.

"Move armor around with mechs?" Halliday asked rhetorically. "Of course we can. The problem is that it throws the gyro off. Trying to make up for the additional mass jumping off and on throws the flywheels out of alignment. What we can do is effectively motorize our battle armor with a mech, but then that mech is only really effective as a transport until it can have its gyro overhauled. They have to have some kind of adaptive gyro that compensates automatically. Until we know how to do that, and right now all we have are theories, we can't move armor around that way."

"Fortunately," Carson cut back in, "if you can call it that, outside of the battle armor they don't seem to exercise combined arms doctrine worth a damn. To date we still haven't seen any signs of vehicles or non-armored infantry, nor have we seen any artillery used, and while they do have ground-attack fighters, they're more along the line of fighters that attack ground targets than fighters that _support_ ground troops."

"What about weapon systems?" Jackson asked.

"Their missile tech is good," Carson acknowledged. "The actual rounds are maybe a bit better than ours, though they don't seem to have as many varieties of ammunition as we do. Their seeker heads look like vastly improved standard seekers, so whatever got them past the minimum-range problem is likely in the launcher rather than the missile. We haven't had the chance to examine any of their actual launchers yet so we can't say if they have anything like the Marines' environment-adaptive launcher, dual-Artemis control units, or our cyclical launchers. We have observed some kind of linked SRM-Streak systems, either exactly that or Streak-compatible SRM-4s and -6s.

"Ballistics is better than Royal-standard, but based on performance it isn't by much. There is no indication that they have anything like the Omni-X series of autocannon and we haven't seen anything like the new railguns—not that we're fielding many of those ourselves.

"Their energy weapons, in comparison, are amazing," Carson finished. "We're seeing in general deployment an extended-range PPC with half again the hitting power of our version of that weapon. They also field a medium laser with a range of half a klick, and a heavy laser of half again that range."

"That's impossible," Jackson said flatly.

"Still true though, General," Carson shrugged. "The only major tactical weakness in the design of their mechs is that they don't seem to use jump jets. At all. I would have at least put some on the small ones and the general-purpose mid-weight units that they seem really fond of."

"As fascinating as this is," spoke up one of the civilians as he leaned forward, "can we move this meeting along?" He was tall, two meters and perhaps a bit more, with blond hair and eyes that could be blue or steel-colored depending on the lighting and his mood. He looked like the scion of a great Prussian military family, or, perhaps, like he had stepped out of a _Whermacht_ recruiting poster. In reality, Bruce Carmichael had the unenviable task of coordinating the logistical needs of the panoply of units that made up Task Force TH-X1138.

"Actually, there is one more point I'd like to raise," Winters said. "Based on neutrino signatures from their reactors, and especially the emission signatures of their aerospace fighters, we know that they are still using hydrogen-fed fusion reactors."

Carmichael abruptly leaned back in his chair. "Indeed?" he asked.

"Should we step out?" Jackson asked, sweeping a hand to include the woman in the DCMS uniform, and the man sitting next to him who, like Liz, wore trews though with a different pattern tartan.

"No," Amanda said. She smiled humorlessly, "it isn't like there's anyone left for you to slip our secrets to. Go ahead, General Winters."

Richard Winters was not at all happy with the idea. She had a point about Jackson, but the other two both had nations, or at least societies, that they could return to. But he thumbed his dataslat to life. "Two decades before the Usurper murdered the First Lord, our laboratories discovered a new superconductor. It's lightweight, low-bulk, and is most efficient at twenty-five degrees."

"Ahh," murmured the man next to Jackson, the latter's face betrayed his complete shock. Takamori's face was an expressionless mask, but that spoke sufficiently for how she felt about the revelation.

"It had a large impact on numerous systems that use strong magnetic fields. One of the unanticipated benefits, however, was that a sufficiently strong field could be produced to make helium-three mining of gas giant planets feasible. This in turn allowed us to create helium-based fusion engines. The nature of the fusion allows for much more efficient direct-energy conversion technologies, and without the radiation produced by the various hydrogen fusion-sequences we were able to cut back on shielding some, though we still maintain enough to use hydrogen in a pinch. The result was a series of fusion engines that are lighter, smaller, and much more efficient for a given class. Unlike normal fusion plants, however, this new series of fusion engines can make use of neither superchargers nor accelerator signal circuitry."

"Not that you need them," Jackson muttered.

"Some of our increased performance does come from better myomers," Winters added mildly. Amanda glared at him, and he briefly contemplated life without civilian control of the military. But it was only a passing fantasy. For one thing he did believe, rather firmly, that actively serving military leaders made for rather poor politicians. Even if he didn't there were his own oaths to consider, and teenage civilian or no, Amanda Cameron wasn't a bad boss. Actually, he thought she'd make a pretty good leader someday, if given the chance. So he relented and quietly added, "I'll make sure you receive a full briefing, Jackson." He nodded to the other two as well so that they knew they were included.

"Alright, Bruce," Amanda said, getting the briefing moving again. "Tell us how bad it is."

"Frankly, m'am, it could be a lot worse," Carmichael said. "As Murakama said, we've running low on fuel. Our environmental plants could do with a good purging, but we've got almost two months before that becomes a requirement for any of them. We're good on scrubbers, but the oxy-tanks need to be recharged in the next month or so depending on ship. We can solve some of our problems by cracking water and use the hydrogen for fuel.

"Food is where we're shortest. We have about three weeks left and then the task force is reduced to eating combat rations. Two months after that we receive the dubious pleasure of subsisting on emergency rations."

He paused to tab his data-slat, but he didn't look down to consult it. Carmichael was one of the rare humans with an eidetic memory, and for him the data-slat was as much a prop as it was anything else. "War stocks. Admiral Murakama's escort group all have their full load of munitions, and are, in fact, anywhere from five to eleven percent over establishment. The transports and Nessies, likewise.

"The ground force has a good stock of primary-expendables—autocannon munitions, short- and long-range missiles, and the like. The biggest shortfall in that area is the cased standard rounds used by the anti-air rotary autocannons for engaging ground targets in emergency situations. The special cased rounds they use since they can't use caseless ammunition is in low supply across the board. We have about a basic load and a half for every _Zeus_ SPAAD and _Rifleman_ air-defense mech, and then we're out.

"Support munitions. Stocks of aerial ordinance are moderate. We don't have any great abundance, but no glaring shortfalls either. Ground artillery, much the same.

"Water-based support is another story. The Marines have less than twenty heavy anti-shipping torpedoes left. Only thirty tons of anti-air SeaArrow missiles left. And _no_ ground-attack SeaArrow missiles left. Those that have been deployed to Planting are mostly training rounds, with a mix of mines, infernos, thermal-optical occlusion, flares, remote-deployed sensors, and the like.

"_Vulcan_ assures me that making up these stocks presents no challenge in and of itself. The difficulty lies in securing a system so that it can deploy and begin production. One with a resource-rich asteroid field is preferable, especially if we want it to shift over to mass-production, but not critical at this time."

Again Carmichael paused to flip to a new page on his data-slate, and once more continued without pausing to look at it.

"Currently we have a six-percent reserve in major combat equipment, mechs, tanks, fighters and the like. That varies between units and specific models. We do _not_ possess sufficient equipment to fill all of the holes in all of our units' tables of equipment. Again, _Vulcan_ says that with sufficient time, all can be made good."

"What about—"

"Replacement components on the fleet-side," Carmichael pressed on, raising his voice to drone out Murakama, "are in good shape. For the most part, spare parts on the ground-side are the same. _However_, stocks of certain laser types, and the light extended-range particle projection cannons, are greatly depleted. The same holds true for standard LRM-20s. Stocks on spare gauss rifles are in the yellow, but not yet critical.

"The Marines multi-role missile/torpedo launchers are in critical short supply. Less than two-score of their Littoral-environment multi-vector thrusters remain to replace damaged components. There are a grand total of eleven unfitted _Aquahawk_-series battle armor, 8 _Stealthhawk_-series, and sixteen _Voidhawk_-series. All the rest of the suits of these types are in use, and all of the equipped _Aquahawks_ are currently deployed. Enough for a heavy company remains of the general-purpose _Blackhawk_ armor."

He stopped, finally glanced at his data-slate just to double check that he had covered everything and that no new glaring problems had been found and forwarded to him by his staff, then looked around at the other people in the compartment.

"_Vulcan_ can make good on these deficiencies?" Amanda asked.

"With time, ma'am," he said. "There is a shortage of Unninni-uninioni…that new 'hot' super-conductor alloy. _Vulcan_ says it can make more if it has the right ores. Basically it comes down to being time-consuming and noticeable, rather than super-difficult. But since its key to just about every piece of next-gen tech that we deploy…" he shrugged.

"My recommendation is that we find a star system with no habitable real-estate and well off the trade-lines, one that has a good, heavy asteroid field, and have _Vulcan_ set up shop there."

"We can certainly consider that option," Amanda agreed. "But to summarize, there are no critical items at this time that will hamper the success of the Planting campaign?"

"No, nothing like that. But I'm going to recommend that we ask them to full our pantries afterwards."

Amanda smiled as others around the table chuckled politely. "Lawrence?" she asked.

Lawrence Thompson was a gangly man with unkempt black hair, who had once hacked Earth's HPG by remote and convinced it to ignore any messages that weren't prefixed with a particularly annoying mid-twentieth century rock-and-roll song.

"Our communications are working," he said. "Our off-the-books internal codes are in play, but I've ordered all of our HPGs shut down. They probably know about _Hood_'s, as well as those that were standard in any of the other ships they've managed to identify. But I doubt rather strongly that they realize that all of our units now have one built into them. I haven't been able to establish contact with the locals from 'ComStar'—" he flashed little air quotes around the word "—but I have managed to interrogate the local HPG with _Hood_'s. It reports itself up and functional, but locked into standby mode. Any failure on its part is operator-error. The woofies could jam the thing, of course, but we'd detect that."

"How likely is it that the station has been captured?" Halliday asked.

"The locals report that ComStar personnel are still at the station," Lawrence replied. He consulted his own data-slate. "On General Felix Steiner's request we have transmitted coded dispatches to Hanse Davion and Melissa Steiner—the co-leaders of the Federated Commonwealth—and to the FedCom High Command. So far we have not received any replies and it is possible that ComStar has decided against sending us our mail."

"The more I hear of this ComStar the less I like it," Amanda said crossly. She sighed and looked down the length of the table. "And now, gentlemen and ladies, we have to decide what we are going to do now. Jackson, your home isn't anymore, but yours are, Stewart, Muriko."

"With respect, _Heika—_" Kurita no Takamori Muriko paused. "It has been an honor to serve you the past fourteen years, _Heika_, but it was the Honor of the Dragon that bade me step forth when the Coordinator of Worlds demanded I stay my hand. For this he declared my fellow warriors of the _Kuronami_, the Black Wave, Unproductive. Our fortunes and worldly possession seized and families cast into the streets and left destitute. All this they did knowingly, for their honor could demand no less of them.

"Earth has been freed from the Usurper, the Hegemony liberated, my cousins avenged. All this I swore to do, and all this has been accomplished. _My_ honor demands I return to Luthien, _Heika_…Amanda. But before I go, I would that you accept my fellow _Samurai_ into your service, to attach their fates to your own."

"Must you go?" Amanda asked.

"_Hai_," the other woman answered.

Amanda turned pale, "but…" Next to her, Victor grasped out with one arm. He found her shoulder and squeezed as best as he was able. Slowly, Amanda nodded. "All right, Muriko, if that's what you want. I'll swear the members of the _Kuronami_ into my service, all of them, and I'll see about arranging transport to Luthien. Is there anything I can do to convince you to stay?"

"No." A pause, "if it is possible, I would ask that you release Major Talbot to accompany me."

Amanda gave her a cold look. "Ask him yourself." She looked at Carson, "General, if he requests, his leave is granted."

"But—"

"General, the figment of outside civilian control vanished the moment we transitioned to this…this brave new world," Amanda said crossly. "So you can back me, convince General Winters or Admiral Murakama to retire and take the job, or you can try to go carve out your own little pirate kingdom. Since I'm the ranking civilian in the room at the moment, you'll just have to suffer with me since they won't and you like being the good guy too much to turn pirate. If Roland Talbot requests leave so that he can go to Luthien with Muriko so that he can be there when she guts herself, then that leave is granted. Understood?"

"Yes, ma'am," Carson replied frostily, but despite the tone he was grinning.

Amanda turned back to Muriko. "What I said is effective as of this moment, Muriko. We'll do the formalities later, will that suffice?"

"_Hai_," the older woman said, bowing as much as the chair's belt and the table would allow her.

"Good," Amanda said with a cool little smile of her own. "Because I did say _all_ of the _Kuronami_, Muriko. If whoever the Coordinator is right now demands your life, so be it. If he _doesn't_, I expect you back here in one piece. Have I made myself clear?"

"_Hai_." This was more reluctant than the last, but a wry grin broke the tension between the two.

"Colonel McLeod," Amanda said, turning to the hitherto-silent man in the uniform of a Northwind Highlander, "will you be requiring the release of your Highlanders?"

"Weel noo, ma'am," Colonel Stewart McLeod, his accent—which normally disappeared into precisely clipped English in combat—thicker than usual, said. "Ah dornt rightly 'hink it's necessary fur us tae be jumpin' tae onie conclusions quite yit. I'll be sending a message, ur a messenger aiblins, back haem tae Northwin'. Until I've heard back frae th' Elders aam inclined tae keep mah Highlanders reit haur wi' ye."

Amanda's lips moved slightly as she repeated what McLeod had said until she had parsed out his meaning. "Thank you, Colonel McLeod; that is very generous. General Jackson, you're in charge of the Legion. Will you see that the other members know what happened and find out what they intend to do? I don't think we can handle moving people out today or tomorrow, if that is what they wish, but we can certainly expedite the process as much as possible."

She sat back in her chair, sipped from her drink bulb before replacing it, and surveyed the table again. "And now, ladies and gentlemen, the Chair will entertain suggestions for what we will do next."

* * *

ICU-067  
SLS _Mercy _(AH-731)  
Planting Orbit

Blada Neely awoke to find herself strapped to a bed in a six-sided compartment. A moment of inspection revealed that the straps were designed to hold a patient to a bed in micro-gravity conditions rather than a serious attempt at restraining her movements. Five of the room's sides had beds with machines clustered around them, while the sixth side had a work station with chair and a door.

"'Bout time you woke up," a voice to her left said. "Docs were beginning to wonder."

"Who are you?" she demanded.

"Reinhardt," he said. "Joseph Reinhardt, Corporal, THMC. You can call me Joe. You're one of those woofie mech-jocks, right?"

"I am Star Commander Blada Neely of Clan Wolf," she said in an icy voice. "Bondsref."

"Well now, Star Commander, that sounds right impressive it does," the man said in a slow drawl.

The door slid open and a woman with the short, practical hairstyle adopted by professional spacers, floated into the room. Blada didn't recognize the uniform, but it was the predominantly white jumpsuit-style uniform that was preferred by technician-caste medical personnel, rather than true medical sub-case scientists. She looked around the room once, then floated over to Blada.

"I'm Sick Berth Attendant first class Elizabeth Campbell," she told Blada. "It's good to see you awake…"

"Star Commander Blada Neely of Clan Wolf," the man supplied when Blada didn't say anything.

"Blada, then," the nurse said with a bright smile. "You can call me Liz. If you need me, that control by your right hand signals the nurse's station. Now, how are you feeling?"

Blada glared at her. "Bondsref."

"Oh, you're going to be one of those," the nurse said. She sighed. "My understanding is that you can only claim that from the person who captured you, right?" she asked. When Blada didn't reply she continued, "You're on a hospital ship and we're all non-combatants up here. I'll see that a message is put out, but you'll likely have to wait until there's a lull in the fighting long enough for whoever it is to come visit, or if he or she is wounded, to make their own appearance. In the mean time the best thing you can do for yourself is relax and heal."

"No. I demanded bondsref," Blada said coldly.

"I'm sorry you feel that way, Star Commander," the nurse said coolly. "As I said, I can't grant that to you. Even if I was allowed to, my own oaths wouldn't let me. I will pass on your request and make sure Surgeon-Commander Juehl is informed." She started to say something else, then shook her head as she realized it would be pointless. "Lunch will be coming around shortly. Good day, Star Commander." She turned and kicked off for the door.

As Blada watched her go, her right hand found the signaling device. It was little more than a hand-held remote with a single button and a cord coming out the other end, the cord serving as both method of signal transmission and secured the device during freefall. It was made of a tough plastic composite, but it hadn't been designed to prevent someone from intentionally damaging it.

She considered the device briefly. Technically only the warrior who had brought about her capture could put bondcords around her wrist, but it was acknowledged that sometimes it was impossible for the bond-holder to leave combat in which case other warriors of the first's star, or occasionally binary or trinary, were allowed to place the cords in the warrior's stead. After that the warrior was supposed to confirm it as soon as practical.

But this…woman had not taken her as bondswoman, instead passing responsibility. When asked for bondsref she again passed responsibility instead of addressing it directly. And, in any case, if she had really not wanted to give bondsref she would have simply denied permission and she hadn't done that.

Satisfied that her honor was as reasonable secure as it could be under the conditions, Blada lay in the bed, ignoring the man nattering away in the bed next to her, as she worked on the device under the sheets. Rewiring it after shattering the casing was pathetically easy.

The door hissed open again and a man, unmistakably what served these people as a medical-sub-caste scientist, entered the chamber with three medical-sub-caste technicians. They started at the bed to the left of the door, which put them opposite her.

They were one bed away when a nurse entered, followed by a gray metal box. Probably containing lunch or whatever served for it in a place like this.

It was quite perfect. Ideally the doctor would have been at her bedside, but the opportunity was too good to pass up. Blada Neely threw off her sheet as best she could and brought up the small call device. "Bondsref," she said loudly and pressed the button.

Even though Blada had not been hooked up to supplemental oxygen, three of the patients in the room were. Even if they hadn't been, the ward they were in normally had a higher-than-normal oxygen content. Furthermore, supplemental oxygen had been used in the room literally for decades. By this time the gas had thoroughly saturated the mattresses, the bedding, the gowns the patients wore and those jumpsuits of the SBAs and doctors. It had even saturated into the bulkheads, the decks, and the very equipment that was used to monitor and treat the men and women who ended up in the room.

Sirens shrieked as every spacer's worst fear after a hull-breach ripped through the compartment in a wall of heat and light. The hatch was slammed closed by an automatic system that cared nothing for the people in the room, programmed with the intent of trying to save other people. The 'cart' with lunch on it was slammed to the deck, but the hatch was stuck open and the oxygen-fire burned through into the ICU ward's nurse's station.

More hatches slammed shut, one killing SBA Elizabeth Campbell as it slammed closed with nearly sufficient force to cut her in half. The ward itself was accessed by an over-sized internal airlock. A juncture control with blast doors that were maintained closed when this close to combatant forces, simply as a safety measure. In this case they prevented the fire from leaving ICU ward 067.

Of the five other rooms that were branched off from the central nurses' station, three worked as designed and the patients and medical staff inside the two in use were left alive and unharmed, although trapped until damage control crews arrived twenty minutes later. This would be too late for two patients who, although not harmed by the fire, were cut-off from life-saving aid. The doors of the final two rooms also slammed shut, but not before the fire had managed to spread into them.

Elizabeth Campbell survived just long enough to know that her body had doomed six patients and five of her colleagues.

* * *

Bridge  
SLS _Mercy_ (AH-731)  
Planting Orbit

Captain Gauthier's eyes flashed at the screen of the communication's repeater that deployed from his command chair. "I don't care who authorized it, Lieutenant," he told the Marine officer over the communications link with the small craft approaching his ship. "The only way any of those…people get on this ship is if they are in chains. I just had an entire ICU ward _gutted_ by one of these flea-ridden curs. I've got more than two dozen dead docs, nurses, and patients. That includes two people that I couldn't get medical attention to because there was a damned oxy-fire between my medical crews and where they were."

"Understood, Sir," The Marine lieutenant on the other side of the channel said coldly. He turned his attention to the assault shuttle he was escorting. "Point Commander. Your inspection is scrubbed. "

"Neg."

The Marine's had drifted over to his weapon controls. His backseater did the same a moment later and the controls flashed green. Almost immediately he got a weapons lock.

"Point Commander, you are _required_ to alter course immediately, or your intentions towards the _Mercy_ will be considered hostile."

"SaKhan Garth Radick will hear of your treachery," came the spat reply as the shuttle altered its heading ninety degrees and began to thrust hard.

"Treachery?" the Marine asked. "Your clansman's cowardly attack on unarmed non-combatant medical personnel was treacherous. Killing warriors in their sickbeds rather than on the field of battle was treacherous.

"This is not treacherous. It is prudent."

* * *

Task Force _Dagger_

"What do you think they're doing, Boss?" George asked.

"Well, they're obviously laying a minefield," I said. _Bun Bun_ was handling the fast lope I had _Dagger_ running at, which left me able to concentrate on more important things. "The problem is that I don't see what they intend to accomplish. It's a classic tiered zonal coverage, with the outer rings being the most dispersed and lightest. The fields will become more extensive and have higher concentrations of mines as we get closer."

"High enough to stop us?"

"I doubt it. We can simply walk or jump our way through the outer rings since they obviously aren't continuous. And we could simply blast our way through the inner rings."

"Maybe that's just what they want us to do," _Heavy_-Six said.

"Delaying action?" I asked.

"Exactly."

"That would mean that they think that they can repair the runways. I can't think of anything else that they'd delay for," George said. "How hard would that be?"

"Draining it would be a bitch," Tammy said. "Probably easier to build fresh. Say, six hours to drop a pre-fab."

"For the fighters, sure," I said. "But droppers won't handle a prefab. Not unless there's ultra hard-pack or bedrock beneath it. Doing the runways would have to take a couple of days at least. That's too long, even if we did a run-around."

"They'd be inside our maneuvering circle," George objected.

"And even they can't be standing on top of an infinite supply of ammunition," I told him.

"Spherical droppers don't need runways."

I stopped. An idea, indistinct and ephemeral, tickled the back of my mind. "Continue, _Dragon_."

"Maybe they could use the droppers as a kind of aerial gunship and need the delay to make modifications. Maybe mount a bunch of artillery tracks inside of them at the doors."

"They don't use armor," I said distantly. "But you're on the right track."

"He is?" Tammy asked.

"I am?"

"Yeah," I said. "What do you want to bet that they're getting ready to airlift in some reinforcements."

"That kind of point-to-point surface shit is damn hard for the spheroids, you know that."

"Sure," I said. "It doesn't make it impossible, and given what we've seen out of their ground forces—by which I mean the Brave Rifles as a whole, not just _Dagger_—do any of you think that the dropper crews aren't well enough trained to pull it off?"

No reply.

"It could be even more simple than that, Roland," George said. "They could be rigging cranes to lift the grounded fighters into the dropships' launch cradles."

"You would be just the person to mention that," I said with a grimace.

"Okay, so we know what they're trying to do and we think we know why they want to do it… How do we stop them?"

"We give them what they want," I said. "Merlin, is one of your mechs capable of coordinating the entire task force's missile barrage?"

"If you mean something as fancy as we talked about in planning, no. If you mean so that every mech can throw a missile into the expected path of a fighter…marginally."

"Good, pick whichever you is the better hacker. That person detaches and moves as quickly and stealthily as possible to the outskirts of the port. I'll fill that person in on what I'm thinking of on a private channel in a moment."

"Better be me," the Cyberpunk told me.

"The rest of us are going to keep right on going…into one of those outer minefields."

"For God's sake…why?" George asked.

"Because I'm betting that they don't know that we know it's there," I said.

"Huh?"

"I don't think that they know about the Dark Star drones," I told him. "If we slow before, they'll be suspicious, if we slow down after, _we'll_ appear suspicious. We'll track where they lay down fields, and we'll parallel each boundary layer. _Bun Bun_ will set up a random number generator so that we'll look like we can only find one gap in three…but we'll walk right past the other two as though they're mined as well."

* * *

**A/N**: I was hesitant to post this because while I've been playing around with the force levels available to the Hegemony forces, this commits me to a specific level of naval force. For the time period they left the escort force they have available is undergunned, especially with the widespread system damage. For the time period they are now it is, at best, highly destablizing. Still, I thought it necessary to give some idea of what's going on in the heads of the leadership, so…

With the use of artillery by TF-Dagger, no actual damage was inflicted by the SeaArrow systems (unless you count Blada Neely's star which was shut down due to heat leves) which mostly altered the terrain to favor Dagger. The conservatives in the Clans would argue that _any_ use of artillery is a violation. The more liberals would argue that only artillery that causes damage is, and that choosing the terrain is the right of the defender which Dagger was by virtue of being pursued.


	20. Chapter 17

**Chapter 17**

Admiral Murakama struggled to keep her face schooled into a polite mask, lest she reveal her true feelings which were rather closer to those of the man on the other end of the communication link. "I assure you, Captain, I am fully aware of how close you are to the combat zone," she said in a calm voice. "I have no objection, under the circumstances, with you cutting off the Clan Wolf inspection teams. However, bringing in armed escorts would be in direct contravention of your agreed-upon neutrality."

The light-speed lag was just enough to be noticeable. "With respect, Admiral, that was _before_ the woofies taken prisoner started blowing themselves up."

A rather unfair statement as so far only one prisoner had done so, and she hadn't so much blown herself up as started a flash-fire that filled the compartment, but Murakama was willing to allow the other man the exaggeration. In its own way his ship was as vulnerable as _Prometheus_ would be with a ship in her work-bay. Until the people in surgery were out, and maybe not even then, maneuvering was out of the question, and this deep inside the gravity well of the system primary—not to mention that of the planet his ship was in orbit around—jumping out was likewise impossible.

"I am aware of this," she said, "as are General Winters and the Boss." No sense in putting the continued existence of the Cameron family out on the radiowaves where anyone could hear, encrypted channel or no. "You have the two assault shuttles we provided to escort inspection flights, as well as their Marine security and boarding crews. That will suffice for now. If the situation deteriorates further we shall reexamine our posture for the defense of your vessel."

"I still don't like it," _Mercy_'s captain told her coldly, "but I suppose I'm not being paid—assuming I even am still being paid—to like it. _Mercy_, clear."

It was a technical violation of protocol. At the very least he should have allowed her the last word before terminating the link. Under the circumstances, Ariel couldn't bring herself to really object to the action.

"Communications, get me a link to _Artic Wolf_ and tell them that I would like to talk with Star Commodore Ch'in. Respectfully, mind. I'll take it in my briefing room."

No sooner had she arrived in her briefing room and belted herself at her workstation, did the holo-projector built into the table activate.

"Ariel," the other woman said instantly.

She didn't smile. Over the last two days they had become…almost friends. They both came from very different cultures, but both were professional naval spacers in militaries dominated by the ground-bound mountains of muscle. "This is a business call, I am afraid, Genevieve," Murakama said, making a conscious effort to not use contractions in deference to the other officer's sensibilities.

"I was afraid of that," Ch'in said seriously. "_Mercy_?"

It wasn't a question.

Ariel nodded. "You have received copies of the appropriate records?"

"Yes," Ch'in said. "There has been some argument as she was not formally taken as bondswomen when it happened. It is allowed for a proxy to slip the cords around a bondman's wrist, due to exigencies of military operations, but that clearly was not the case here. And in any case Bondsref was not formally refused."

"I know our rules and regulations may seem quaint and old-fashioned to you," Ariel said, knowing that it was likely that their actually views were likely something else entirely, "but our people believe in them, follow them, and expect others to do the same. If some compromise that both of our sides agree to can not be made to work, I can foresee some very unfortunate possibilities in the future."

Something flickered in the depths of Ch'in's eyes, but the other woman simply shook her head. "I am sorry, Admiral Murakama. I simply command the naval transportation and escort for Beta Galaxy. I suggest that you talk to the saKhan about these issues."

"I've tried," Ariel said, allowing contractions to enter her speech again. "I'm afraid that so far he's always been 'occupied' when I tried to call."

"Unfortunate," Ch'in murmured. "Is there anything else I can do for you, Admiral Murakama?"

"I have been asked to deliver a message," Murakama said. "General Winters wishes me to inform you that under the circumstances, military inspections of _Mercy_ are discontinued as of this point. Whether or not they will resume is a matter of debate."

"I see," Ch'in said slowly. "Is there any more?"

"One thing more," Murakama said. "He wants you to know that any unauthorized approach to within three hundred kilometers of _Mercy_ will be considered a hostile act against a hospital ship, and a violation of the laws of war and will be answered with full force and rigor of the Star League Defense Force…up to and including the use of trans-atomic warheads."

Ch'in blanched. "You cannot be serious. I thought you ascribed to the Ares Conventions."

"We do," Murakama said. "But the only enforcement of the laws of war are the laws of war themselves. They very explicitly allow for limited, deliberate breaking of the laws of war to respond to other violations. Further, and now I quote directly 'Honorable combat will only be given to those who conduct themselves with honor. Attacking a hospital ship, like the willful orbital bombardment of a civilian population center, cannot in anyway be construed as an honorable act.'

"He hasn't said anything about not taking prisoners, Commodore. But if it comes to it, it is clear that he does not intend for there to be many prisoners to take."

"I see," Ch'in said bleakly. She took a sharp breath and released it. "Very well. Admiral Ariel Murakama, if it comes to it, will you offer me honorable combat?"

"If it comes to it I will release a full listing of my ships and their classes," Murakama allowed, "but no doubt as you already know that even without nukes I substantially outgun you. I submit that it is in both of our interests that it not comes to that. I assure you, General Winters was…quite sincere in his willingness to destroy vessels that he cannot use."

* * *

_Tri-City Agri-Complex  
_

"Why does the Lieutenant hate us, Sergeant?"

Sergeant 1st Class Lawson, the commander of 2st track, command element, B 'Bandit' Troop, looked up from what he was doing at PFC Edgar Bergstrom. "The Lieutenant doesn't hate us, private," Lawson said. "He just hates you."

There were good-natured jeers from the rest of the work-party.

"Lieutenant Dzjecki's problem, Bergstrom," Corporal Storey, first platoon three-tack's commander spoke up, "is that in his eyes he's committed an unpardonable sin."

Lawson looked at Storey, unlike him and Bergstrom Storey had followed Dzjecki from his original platoon.

"What do you mean, Corp?" asked the gunner from four-track.

"Lieutenant Dzjecki, formerly First Sergeant Dzjecki, has forgotten more about soldiering, _real_ soldiering, than the writers of any score of manuals have ever learned," Storey said. "You see, Private Bergstrom, he descends from good NCO stock. Somewhere three millennia—and more—back his ancestor stumbled out of the wilderness and walked into the first Roman Legion Recruiting Office he saw.

"Since then all that information has been passed down, generation after generation."

"You mean like some sort of genetic memory?"

"Exactly so, Private Bergstrom."

"But wouldn't that knowledge have been halved with each generation? If each parent only contributes half—"

"Sergeants don't breed like normal mortals, Private," Lawson said seriously. "We reproduce by fission. Just like an amoeba. Ask any Corporal."

"Exactly," Storey said. "My point is, if asked to, Dzjecki could instruct men on assembling trebuchets and ballistae. He could teach close-order drill to Swiss pikemen, or instruct Wellington's infantry in the order of arms. We called him First Sergeant, the Terran Alliance Marine Corps would have called him Gunny, but if we said _Primus_ _Pilus_ he would respond just as naturally.

"The problem is that now he's an officer. Sergeants don't like being made into officers. It upsets the natural order. Throws units into chaos. It goes against his genetics, and is a crime against his forebears."

"Corporal," Lawson said. "Your mouth is open and your hands aren't doing anything, you best see to that."

Storey looked at Lawson for a moment, but then nodded. "Sorry, Sarge."

Lawson watched as Storey's crew resumed their task of track maintenance. Once upon a time, changing a track-pad would have meant cracking the whole track and driving the road wheels off of it and onto a new one. It could very well be—what with the general decline and all—that that was still what happened today. In the case of the _Hexapuma_, the track-pads were attached to the track itself with a pin. Replacing a worn, cracked or otherwise damaged pad simply meant removing the pin, swapping out the bad pad, and replacing the pin. Of course, removing/replacing the pin was a lot of work, but it was better to keep the privates busy than to give them time to think.

Satisfied that Storey was doing his job and that the other work crews were pulling theirs—splitting up the tank crews had been Lawson's spin on the new lieutenant's orders, better to get them at least a little familiar with each other—Lawson turned back to what he had been working on.

The main gun of the _Hexapuma_ was a genuine piece of art and unique to the _Hexapuma_. It was also big. Really big. And as effective as it was, it still ate up a disproportionate amount of maintenance time, without which Bad Things were known to happen. Servicing it was a job below his paygrade even before the new stripe which, as of yet, he had not stitched on.

He had the best job in the entire regiment, the senior NCO of the senior-most troop. There were fourteen other tanks he was responsible for. Stretching out beyond them were the _Direcats_ of Apache and Crazyhorse troops. So many holes had been shot into their formations that the Regiment had been reorganized into two squadrons centered under the 1st and 2nd Squadron Headquarters—3rd Squadron had been effectively decapitated the first night, and had been shuffled into a regimental reserve. All too often its troops had found themselves being thrust into untenable positions and asked to hold to buy time for the other squadrons to withdraw.

Now 1st Squadron was organized into two out-sized troops of _Direcats_ and one of _Hexapuma_ MBTs. Properly speaking he supposed they should have been designated companies, but he was just as glad that they weren't. Likewise the 2nd Squadron had been organized with a single _Direcat_ troop screening a pair made up of _Heapumas_.

He wasn't quite sure if it was really ideal. The tanks could more or less handle the enemy 'mechs, but were vulnerable to the battle armor close-in. The _Direcats_, and especially their Pill-equipped dragoon teams, were better against the armor, but vulnerable to the heavy weapons of the 'mechs. Mixed troops hard worked pretty well, but too many tactical organizations had been shot full of holes. It took training to get a troop of mixed vehicle types to really coordinate efficiently together. Unfortunately they didn't have time for that kind of training which probably explained the new formations.

* * *

_Remington, 3d Cavalry Regiment Headquarters & Headquarters Troop_  
_Somewhere in the Danton-Sontor-Belex Tri-cities area._

"Crankshaft just went off the air."

Colonel Chaffee looked up at the captain who had reported the death of the command element of the 82nd Combat Engineer Battalion. "How much?" He wasn't asking how many had been killed, wounded or captured, or how much equipment had been lost. It was a question of how much we left, and the captain had more than enough experience to tell the difference.

"Three armored earthmovers, a half of their combat engineer vehicles, and a lance of their incendiary mechs, that doesn't include what they attached to _Mustang_. The mechs are low on ammo."

Chaffee nodded in thought. It was the first time he'd had the pleasure of having the _Fireman_ incendiary engineering 'mech under his direct command, and they had impressed him greatly. The SLDF combat engineers didn't use a whole lot of mechs, and those they did were mostly militarized industrial models. The _Fireman_ was a limited-run rebuild of the standard-issue combat engineering 'mech that used components available to the Cav, but the Cav didn't have much use for. The result was a 'mech that ran very hot indeed, but managed to cram in a lightweight two-shot inferno missile launcher, an indirect fire-support weapon that could lob incendiary shells, four flamers fed from its fusion plant plus a fifth that ran on the standard inflammables, and one of the brand-new plasma cannons especially tuned for setting things on fire. It even managed to carry a decent, but not spectacular, amount of armor for a mech that was, strictly speaking, not a primary combatant. Unfortunately, everything short of the flamers needed ammunition.

Air attacks had stopped after the raid on the Foshinur spaceport, the few vertols and his air-defense units enough to stand off the limited fighter patrols sent their way, but he had to wonder how long it was going to take to make repairs to the runways necessary to launcher a heavy fighter strike. He didn't have enough vertols left to stage another attack. _Pegasus_ and _Stetson_ troops had provided cover for Steiner's aviation wing for the attack on the airfields, now the fighters were dead and most of P and S troops had died as well. And _Nomad_ and _Outlaw_ troops had waltzed into the aerial equivalent of an ambush while out hunting the woolfie command unit. The only reason any of _them_ had survived was that they had managed to lead the woofies into the fire of a pair of air-defense tracks.

Effectively, Chaffee was down to two aerial scout troops (_Quicksilver_ and _Renegade_) which were mostly equipped with light _Delphis_ vertols, one utility troop (_Tomahawk_), and one understrength troop of mixed _Delphis_ and _Orcas_ that were the survivors of the four dead attack troops.

He frowned. They were in and among the agri-complexes now. Hulking factories that could take a live steer, slaughter it, process it, and have steaks packaged for shipping in less than an hour. Or that could take a iced fish cargo of a ship that dwarfed ancient earth oil tankers, and produce cargo-containers of choice fillets in have an hour. It wasn't the terrain he wanted to fight in. _Ironhawk_ had proved that it was possible for his tracks to fight an effective mobile operations campaign. It would take longer than he'd prefer because the woofies _were_ fast, just not quite fast enough. But that didn't stop him from wanting to cut loose and do just that, despite the casualties his people had taken.

Still.

If Steiner had had a full-strength unit then he and Chaffee could have turned the factory complexes into an abattoir that would have taken orbital bombardment to dislodge. Chaffee had taken one look at the TO&E of what the other man had called a Regimental Combat Team and shivered. On paper it was a huge formation resembling a heavy combined-arms division. Five regiments of infantry, the lightest of them motorized, three of armor, and a ninth of mechs. Two aviation wings and a battalion of artillery to back up those units that didn't have organic artillery assets provided support. Plus the usual attachments, supply and service troops, MPs, engineers, military intelligence, an air defense section…

As it was he had started with a full complement of mechs, and one of the aerospace fighter wings, but only two battalions of armor and some supporting infantry. That kind of fire-power still made for a dandy open-field engagement if the armor was properly handled and in the same tech-generation or close to it as the enemy's mechs, but the stuff Steiner had wasn't even close to having technical parity.

Chaffee had entered the fight thirty percent under-strength in his ground squadrons (the aviation squadron had been built back up to full by attachments), but the attached mech battalion had barely thirty percent of its authorized strength. The other units General Winters had provided had helped, but hover units were of strictly limited usefulness in the confines of a built up urban area the battle was now in.

"Contact _Skynet_, have him move half of his _Zeus_es to this intersection here," Chaffee said, indicating a position in the holographic tactical map as he came to a decision he didn't like but didn't see any other options for. "Tell him they need to be prepared to engage ground targets."

"Sir?" the captain asked uncertainly.

Chaffee didn't blame him. The ZSU-77 was only the latest in a design that dated back to well before the second Russian Civil War. It was a big track with weak armor, but had a Garret D3k targeting and tracking system—the successor to the venerable Garret D2j found in the _Rifleman_ battlemech, and the _k_-variant was specifically configured for use in combat vehicles—a pair of multi-barreled autocannons, and two six-cell launchers for the advanced sparrowhawk-series of air-intercept missiles. They were effective, expensive units, and they weren't designed for ground combat.

"You heard me," Chaffee said. "I need someone to block that intersection, and until I can get the squadrons reorganized Steiner—and those _Zeus_es—will just have to bloody well hold. Those autocannons ought to do just fine in ripping apart battle armor, and I'll be very surprised if the sparrowhawks can't manage to lock up a sixty-tone battlemech. If they can't, then at least they can be dumb-fired."

How much damage they would do was another question, and one he didn't have an answer for. The sparrowhawk had a directional-blast-fragmentation warhead that made it just dandy against aerial targets, but would likely do fuck-all to ground targets that didn't need to worry about things like aerodynamic lift.

"Yes sir." Pause. "We don't have a lot of the modified standard rounds _Mustang_'s ADA _Rifleman_ 'mechs use, but I can check and see if the 41st has some stuff in the right caliber with a charge that the breeches can handle. It'll give them something at least if the woofies bring mechs to call."

"You do that," Chaffee said, irritated that the idea hadn't occurred to him.

He considered the map once more, decided there wasn't anything he could do to immediately improve the situation, and turned back to the holos of this two surviving ground squadron commanders.

"_Tiger_?" he asked.

"We need at least another hour," replied the commander of the first squadron. "The usual issues, sir, and we're closing up from some vital maintenance now."

"_Sabre_?"

"The same, Colonel, and probably more. We have more units on the platoon/lance level to build, and have to affect a movement."

Chaffee checked the map again, and estimated Steiner's rate of retreat. This led to an estimate of how long he had before the Hussars were to pass through his lines. Then he cut that estimate by a third, and decided that they'd have enough time, if only just.

The reorganization had taken hours. _Thunder_ had been gutted between the attack at the canal and the night-time assault that destroyed the headquarters troop and killed most of the command staff (the senior surviving officer had been Captain Fortes, 3rd Squadron's logistics officer), an hour before a more conventional attack against the line troops of the squadron.

_Tiger_ and _Sabre_ had been better off, but not by much, with holes shot into most of their unit organizations. His reorganization made _Tiger_ a lighter, faster unit and gave each troop—including the tanks—its own six-gun artillery battery for support. _Sabre_, in contrast, had became a very heavy anvil indeed, and there had been time to off-load most of the _long lance_ missiles, which were of strictly limited use in the confines of the city, and replace them with more autocannon ammunition.

Such a drastic reorganization was going to have a ruinous effect on unit combat capability, of course. There was no getting around it. But at least it was something that at least a few of the troopers had done before, and if the tactical analysis was correct he had an edge—as of yet un-quantified, but no less real—in command and control capability.

"_Tiger_, _Sapper_ will have fall back positions prepared in the next half-hour, and will deliver the coordinates of them to you. Make sure your people know where their assigned primary and alternates are. You have one hour to be in your initial positions, contact expected in seventy five minutes."

"_Sabre_," he continued, to the second squadron commander. "You have eighty minutes to be in position."

He paused long enough for both of them to nod.

"This one is going to be ugly," he continued. "There's no avoiding that. So let's be smart and professional about this. Do your jobs, don't try to be heroes."

"We're the Cavalry, Chief," _Tiger_ said. "It's just another word for hero."

"Brave Rifles," _Sabre_ echoed.

"Blood and Steel," Chaffee said, before adding with a wry grin, "Roll 'em out."

"Sir." "Colonel."

The holos shimmered and disappeared, and Chaffee punched a command into a communications panel. "_Avalon_ Six, _Brave Rifle_-Six-Actual. Put the Boss on."

"_Avalon_-Six-Actual, go _Rifle_."

"Twenty minutes for _Tiger_ to be in position, they'll be expecting you to pass through their lines thirty minutes from now, General."

"Only that long?" Steiner asked. "The reorganizing you were suggesting…"

"We won't be as effective as I'd like," Chaffee said. "Even we can't simply break apart teams and create new ones without a loss of synergy. Our tech helps, yes, but I'll still take losses because my people won't have experience fighting alongside the people they are now teamed with. But I should be able to concentrate enough firepower along their line of advance so that they don't notice anything, and the hover-troops will be able to race along and pepper them from the flanks by firing down side-streets. _Quicksilver_ and _Renegade_—_Rogue_ troop wants in as well but I don't know if they'll be ready—will be up soon, and they can give us a vertical element, and if they try bringing aerospace fighters in on our level my _Zeus_ tracks will make their pilots regret it very, very briefly."

"What's the status of _Dagger_?"

Chaffee keyed the holographic tac-map. "Pressing in on the starport," he told his ally.

It was a stretch. _Dagger_ had slowed considerably and the relayed overhead from stealthed recon drones showed why. The woofies were rapidly constructing one of the larger rocket-deployed minefields that he had ever seen. It was an impressive effort, and if Roland didn't get off his ass soon it just might succeed in buying them enough time to get a runway put back together.

* * *

Shit.

Merlin bit off a curse aimed at the unknown person who'd created the MS-standard for operating systems. This was followed by a second oath concerning persons who didn't take proper care of their equipment.

Neither of these was presenting an insurmountable challenge, however. The MS-standard had existed for three-quarters of a millennia before he was born, so it wasn't all that surprising that it had survived to reach its one-millennium anniversary while he was…away. Likewise, people had been abusing their computers, and leaving them to tech-support to fix—for almost as long. Both were challenges he had long mastered working around, and in the case of the operating software it looked like something he had cracked a good eight or nine years before the miss-jump.

The _real_ problem he was having was with the general decline of just about everything vaguely technological. Fusion reactors were made out of grade-school magnets, duct tape, and bailing wire. Computers were made with printed circuits. He'd found _copper wire_ of all things when he'd first tried to tie into the control net…

The 'firewalls' and 'security protocols' the starport had to protect itself were laughable at best, but the datanet was so slow there was a very real chance that he'd die of old age before his objectives were completed.

He hoped the off-site security protocols that were supposed to keep unauthorized people from hacking into the system from outside of the starport—the same stuff he had bypassed by getting physically inside the starport and _then_ tying in rather than the reverse—were better. The physical security had actually given him a little trouble to get through, though most of it seemed to have been set up by the woofies.

At the same time, however, he wasn't going to bet a round of beers on it. The Cray MvX data-core that the starport used as a master system had probably been the top of the line—as befitted a breadbasket of Plantings importance—when it had been put in. That had occurred sometime in the three or four decades before the formation of the Star League. The MS-standard operating system was at least four years behind on its security updates, but at least it was only thirty or forty years old.

Despite it being brand new while he was…away, most of the system architecture he recognized from a program he'd taken apart before he'd been told joint the SLDF or else by a judge unsympathetic to his claims not to have recognized the laughably easy-to-penetrate firewalls of a major interstellar bank as something meant to tell the curious that unauthorized entrance was a Bad Idea. The graphics were updated though. If you could call it updating. The one he'd taken apart had been intended for a three-dimensional interactive input/output device. This one barely managed two dimensions, and the touch-screen interface looked like it would cause the system to crash if someone breathed on it heavily.

"Let's see," the Cyberpunk murmured to himself. "It looks like their droppers still use hydrogen fuel sources…imagine that."

* * *

A/N:I apologize for the mis-post. For those that missed it, Interlude 3 was the last previous post before this one.


	21. Chapter 18

**Chapter 18**

Viktoriya Zhukovna's blue eyes shone with all the icy mercy of her homeland's winters, the same winters that had swallowed the armies of Fedor von Bock, Friedrich Paulus, and Napoleon I. "This," she said in a voice that was even colder, so cold that each word seemed to freeze into ice and shatter as she spoke it, "is unacceptable."

"I'm sorry, Captain, but our stocks of the missiles you requested are severely limited," said the ordnance officer she had been arguing for more than two hours with. "I simply must retain some kind of reserve. Even if I didn't and wiped out my entire stock, it _still_ wouldn't be enough to fill your request."

Viktoriya sucked in a breath to reply, but realizing it would get her nowhere, released it in an explosive rush. "Fine," she said tightly. "What _can_ you give me?"

"Four hundred artillery rockets of the type specified," the other officer relented. "Eighty percent of the weapons of that type in stock."

It wasn't nearly enough. Roland wanted her to blast a travel corridor through a minefield that was two kilometers wide and had to be at least five times that deep. In addition there was the possibility of a duel with artillery-mechs which should, at least, not prove dull. Finally, she was supposed to re-crater the runway and engage any aerial targets that showed up to spoil the party. All of that, and provide an additional air-defense element against fighters and the possibility of enemy DropShips being used to achieve air dominance.

To do this she had twenty-four _Padilla_ missile-artillery tracks. Eight of them were hers, but as the senior-most captain she was also in charge of the other two batteries that Colonel Chaffee had detached for this op. There were thirty-two field artillery ammunition support vehicles, the extras consisting of tracks whose primary had been destroyed. Each of the FAASVs was a _Padilla_ hull with the launchers removed for ammunition storage racks, and a loading conveyor. With full loads her little command could carry over four _thousand_ missiles. Four hundred _Rocket, Anti-Area Denial_ missiles was less than a tenth that, and clearing that minefield was her primary mission.

"Fine," she said bitingly. Which left an awful lot of room in her tracks. A thought occurred to her. "How are stores of smoke and dual-purpose improved conventional munitions?"

Pause, then slow smirk. "I will require forty-eight FASCAM packs, and prepare a place in storage for twenty-four five-round missile stowage racks. We shall not need them."

* * *

"Hey, Boss, tell me something. Do you really think this is going to work?"

I glared at the mini-lop in the middle of the cockpit that was in the process of sharpening a bowie knife that was larger than it was.

"I wouldn't be doing this if I didn't," I said. Whoever was in charge over their _had_ to be worried that I'd try an end-around or, at the very least, was keeping him occupied while another force set up to take the spaceport from the south. A minefield nearly ten kilometers deep that, while thin on the outer bands quickly grew increasingly dense, stretched out in a half circle from the spaceport, directly between it and me.

The only problem was that I didn't want to do an end-around. If I did that it would give him half of forever to bombard me with missiles as my little task force went racing down the approach. Sitting around wasn't an option either. Sooner or later Mr. Radick would figure out what I was doing and if he was smart he'd send a couple of his companies (together this time) to sort of hurry me along. If that didn't happen, the runway would get repaired and then it'd be enemy aerospace fighters…

"Did Merlin get his revised instructions?" I asked.

"Well it's not like he'd tell us if he did. I mean, he's like a bunny out in the middle of a pack of wolves. Best that kind of person can do is freeze and not get noticed. Who knows, sometimes it even works.

"Now, if you had sent a real _rabbit_, we could all have nice wolf-fur rugs to keep our feet warm on the damn dropship. It's all very well for you mammals who get to put on socks and shoes and stuff, but that damn deck is cold."

"Uh-huh," I said. After the first couple of years _Bun Bun_'s antics had gotten so much easier to ignore. "So you haven't heard from him?"

"For the love of alfalfa…_no_, I haven't heard from the wizard."

"What about—"

"Him neither."

"Then what brought this on?" I asked.

_Bun Bun_ didn't reply.

"_Bun Bun_?" I asked.

"The White Bitch called it in."

Viki was regular-SDLF, not THUS, although the _Padilla_ missile-arty tracks she used was substantially better than anything she'd had before joining us. She and the rest of her battery were orphans that had been picked up shortly after we'd had to abandon _Tirpitz_ and _Abyss_ had shifted over to Admiral Murakama's flagship. They were often assigned to units as ad-hoc attachments, either to fill in for combat losses or to beef up strength.

Where and when she had picked up the handle 'Jadis' I had no idea, and the most I had ever gotten out of her was that 'the character reminds me of home.' Considering that her home's winters had a tendency to eat armies I'm sure there was some kind of profound statement in there somewhere. It was not surprising, however, that she had tagged her battery after herself using the callsign 'White Witch'.

_Bun Bun_ didn't like her.

Well…it didn't like her so far as it actually had feelings. It was easy to forget, especially among us that really should know better, that the diagnostic interface computers weren't true AS. He could manage my communications as well as any human comm.-officer and run tactical analysis as any intel officer, as well as interpret my sense of balance for the gyro buried in my mech's torso, but all of that came from a revolution in super-conductor technology, more than a decade working together, and the most technically advanced neuro-helm ever devised.

_Bun Bun_ the DI, on its own, without my brainwaves, scored about the same as a really bright dog on the sentience scale, which was neither fair to it nor the dog. _Bun Bun_ was an expert at what it did, but it had no room to grow outside of the limitations of its programming. A dog could learn tricks, true enough, but it could also tell when someone was sad and offer support, or it could detect when its master was going to have a heart attack of seizure, or it could even see for a person. A dog could form likes and dislikes in music, be lonely when no one was around, and form a preference of squirrels to rabbits to chase.

_Bun Bun_'s, and its fellows, ability to pass the Turing Test (well, computers had been doing that since before humanity set foot on Mars) was strictly put into its programming to make it seem less alien to the end users (yours truly). Why the so-called 'personality programming' had chosen Viki as the specific person to go off on I had no idea. In all likelihood some little random event generator buried in its programming had flipped and decided that it was going to display antagonistic personality quirks toward Viktoriya Zhukovna.

I considered dialing down the personality programming again, but decided against it. The damn DI was just better when I left it alone and right now I was going to need it. But at the same time I made a note to talk with the techs, none of the other DIs seemed so…individualistic.

"And what did Captain Zhukovna want to know?" I asked mildly just to tweak it a little.

The radio crackled before the personality programming of _Bun Bun's_ DI computer could reply.

"_White Witch_-Lead to _Dagger_-Six."

"Go, _Witch_," I responded.

"In position. Guns deployed."

It is a very minimal message. Micro-burst transmission. Minimal in duration, minimal in information. It was also very hard to direction-find and almost impossible to jam.

Her tracks didn't have AVIX, the Automated Vehicular Information Exchange that was to the Cavalry and Marines on troop/squadron/regiment-or higher level, what ARES was to the individual soldier, whether a mech-jock or a vehicle driver or, well, anyone really. Her comms just weren't as secure. There was no point at this late in the game of tipping off the enemy if they were able to penetrate our communications because of it. But the point was still clear. The revised plan was go the moment I gave the word.

On the wide-cast holographic battlefield suspended in front of me, nine tiny little machines were running towards me.

"Are their safe-lanes accurately plotted?"

"Affirmative." _Bun Bun_'s avatar had taken on a pronounced Austrian accent. "They are approaching the end of their runs."

I smirked. "Jadis, the Deplorable Word is _given_."

"_Fireball_, _White Witch_-Lead. Charn, I say again, Charn."

"_Dagger_," I said. "_Dagger-_Six. Execute missile barrage."

* * *

The Titan-Master series of heavy LRM launchers were reliable, robust, and _expensive_. Like the Super-Archer series of light LRM launchers they could tie into a dual Artemis IV Fire Control module—officially it was designated Ullr after the Norse Archer-God, but nobody but the manufacturer and the manufacturer-provided technical manuals called it that. The dual AFC could link together two adjacent launchers to fire at one target. In effect it allowed two LRM or SRM launchers to share a single Artemis IV Fire Control Module, which saved weight and mass.

There were, of course, downsides to the system. Nestled between two launchers, especially the Titan-Masters LRM launchers, over-heating its more delicate insides was always an issue. Also, there was a lack of redundancy. One good penetrating hit could cost the enhanced fire-control capability of two different launchers whereas losing a standard control unit would only cost that of a single launcher. And, because the launchers needed to be stacked 'above' and 'below' the control module, ammunition almost always had to be carried somewhere the launchers weren't. The right kind of hit could seriously compromise missile feed-tubes, and losing a limb could mean losing either the launchers or ammunition for them.

The Titan-Masters, however, were not more expensive because of the dual AFC. Most of the expense for that system was in the control module. No, the Titan-Masters had an ability that, like the Marine's multi-environment launchers, R&D had been promising for centuries and never able to develop. A single Titan-Master LRM-20 launcher could split its fire up to four ways.

Like many proclaimed 'super weapons' it fell well short of what its supporters' claims.

It couldn't use _any_ kind of fire-control enhancement in multi-target mode. Partial sections couldn't be reloaded individually, the entire launcher had to be shot dry first. Maintenance was absolutely horrendous. And, while the 'first' target had all the accuracy anticipated, it fell off with each subsequent target.

As far as a surprise weapon went, it was fairly effective, but on a tactical level it was another story. In tactical situations with a LOS on the enemy it was fairly useless, in indirect fire-support it was even worse—at least so far as mechs and tanks were concerned. Against infantry in the open it was just dandy, and the results of a Titan-Master LRM-20 loaded with fragmentary missiles in a bombardment mission against infantry in the open had to be seen in all of its gory detail to be believed.

We carried them for two reasons. First, the scattering affect in indirect-fire mode was very useful for scattering ordnance over a wide area, so long as you only had a general area you wanted it spread out in and nothing too specific. Second, the construction used to make the launchers able to split their fire involved putting a section of armored plate between every five tubes. This, coupled with four independent fire-circuits, was the cause of much of the maintenance headaches but actually increased ruggedness. Even a penetrating hit wouldn't be guaranteed to 'kill' the weapon, as the cofferdam construction could protect the rest of the launch tubes.

The _Archer_s, ironically, carried more of the LRM-variant RAAD than the larger _Longbows_. Unlike the smaller mechs, the _Longbows_ had no integral jump jets and so had been forced to carry heavy, bulky strap-on jets for the jump. Without the need for the strap-on jets, the _Archers_ had been able to load down a mission support pack with a variety of niche ammunition types, knowing that, in an emergency the MSP could be jettisoned without worrying about suddenly being out of necessary ammunition. Now the _Archers_ went to rapid-fire on their launchers while the _Longbows_ took somewhat slower, more deliberate shots.

* * *

Kilometers away Viktoriya was watching the tactical display inside the command compartment of the _Padilla_ tracked rocket-artillery vehicle known to its crew as _Artic Thunder_. Now she stretched in her seat before speaking in a husky voice. "All units, _White Witch_-Lead. Load FASCAM. Go to rapid fire on all launchers…_shoot!_"

In rapid-fire it took each of the improved launchers six seconds to cycle. The first shoot was complete in thirty seconds, and the drivers, who had been holding the _Padillas_ in 'drive' with the brakes on instead of in 'park' like the Book called for, slammed their throttles wide open. With the stabilizers and shock supports locked down for the firing sequence the sudden ride was far rougher than normal. The window shutters had been thrown closed and bolted (the exhaust from the rockets was mildly toxic) and nobody took the time to open them so they couldn't see—though in this case there really wasn't anything too be seen so the point was a wash.

"Overheat warning on #2!"

The new launchers cycled faster, but for simplicity they retained the original 'hot-shot' specification. A more complicated 'cold-shot' system would have kicked each missile clear using compressed gas, which would have produced less wear on the launcher and a smaller thermal bloom. Unfortunately the designers had failed to include such a system and the material construction of the launcher had not been upgraded to fully deal with the effects of the faster possible launch time.

"Coolant flush," Viktoriya ordered as the stabilizers and shocks were released a moment before there was a terrific thump as they went through a hedgerow.

A hiss filled the compartment as a small quantity of coolant from the tank that had replaced one of the eight missile stowage racks inside of the _Padilla_ was sprayed from the track's coolant system into the launcher where it boiled away.

"Light green."

"_Fireball_, _White Witch_-Lead, break as assigned and continue bombardment as planned," Viktoriya ordered. She switched to the intercom. "Prep fire mission two."

"Fire mission two," repeated the gunner. "Transmitting…" In his armored compartment he transmitted the copy of fire mission two that was in his computer to all of the other _Padillas_ in the battery. They transmitted theirs to all the other tracks as well, and the computers checked all of the copies to make sure there weren't any mistakes. "…Good copy, Cap. Loading fire mission two."

Loading mission two consisted of selecting a preset and pushing a button. The feed queue cycled automatically, pulling the anti-air Arrow missile that had been automatically fed into #1 launcher at conclusion of fire mission one, #2 launcher having aborted the loading sequence automatically when the overheat warning had been triggered. Tube one was reloaded with a dual-purpose improved conventional munitions dispensing rocket, while a large cratering charge was fed into launcher two. The latter would make a big hole in the runway being rebuilt, and the DP-ICM would scatter cluster bombs across the runway. Some of the bomblets would explode immediately and create further, smaller craters that would have to be patched while others ran on time delays or until they were disturbed, which would make it more hazardous for those doing the repairs.

"_Witch_-Seven, fire mission complete."

"_White Witch_-Eight, mission complete."

Viktoriya nodded to herself. Seven and Eight had been tasked with a PsyOp mission. The last sequence of missiles they had launched had contained remote deployed speakers and leaflet dispensers. The speakers produced an audible version of the warning on the leaflets, namely that the runway and air-traffic facilities were going to come under artillery attack.

"Captain, fire mission two, up!"

"Driver, halt."

The track came to a rapid, shuddering halt.

"Lock down."

Stabilizers and shocks, which had been released after the initial rush to displace from their first firing position lest they fall victim to counter-battery fire, once more locked and the _Padilla_ went rigid.

She looked at the clock. Twenty seconds since Seven and Eight? Better consider it as ten.

"Gunner, rapid-fire, fire mission two. Fifty seconds."

"Fifty seconds, fire mission two."

The delay seemed impossibly long. Across the compartment the Master Gunnery of her battery was drumming a thumb on his control panel. Safely away from the large red button, Viki noted, before turning back to her own panel.

_Shoot!_"

Again the thunderous noise of the launchers, the _Padilla_ was shaken violently. It was so load that even with the full-ear headsets and the intercom it was hard to be heard.

* * *

Latharn Fetladral slowly tapped his fingers on the arm of his command couch and tried to make sense of the information flowing to him.

The BattleMechs that were now once again resuming their advance had done something impossible to their missile launchers…or at least to the LRM launchers carried by the pairs of ancient _Archers_ and _Longbows_. Given how backwards their missile-technology was, mounting three or four LRM-5 packs was lighter and than a single LRM-15 or -20. In the case of the LRM-20 a quartet of LRM-5s were less bulky as well. But to get the kind of accuracy displayed by the one _Longbow_ in the missile-duel hours before with Trinary Battle they had to be using some kind of fire control unit. The Clans could do that, barely, if they maximized weight savings and managed to keep the bulk down, but they could not fit in all of those launchers with their fire-control systems, and still have enough mass and room to fit in a decent amount of ammunition much less any other weapons

The initial artillery barrage had effectively pinned his binary, a tactically brilliant move, but then they had failed to follow up on it. Instead of a long-range artillery duel—albeit with his machines low on ammunition of the wrong type—they had settled for littering over his base and broadcasting warnings about their next attack. Was it some kind of ploy to sow trouble among the lesser castes, or an effort to make them desert, or was it just some ham-handed way of trying to retain honor while using weapons that did minimal damage to the runway but caused grievous injuries to the civilian technicians and laborers?

And then there was the artillery itself that had been deployed against him. Tracks of the launches had made it quite clear that there were twenty-four tracks, each with two launchers. But after the initial bombardment to deny his binary safe passage through their own minefields, only sixteen had been observed.

What he really wanted to do was load up his OmniMech and go hunt down and destroy the artillery tracks. They had to be _Padillas_. The only other missile-artillery track observed were ancient _Chaparral_s and they possessed only a single launcher and were twenty klicks slower than the data indicated. Obviously modified, perhaps with some kind of carousel clip for rapid fire capability? With two pulse lasers—albeit inferior ones—and deeper missile magazines, each actually outgunned one of his _Nagas_, but their armor was weak.

But while he did that the BattleMech force to the north would destroy his binary and seize the DropShips and he could not allow that to happen.

"Star Captain."

He turned to his communication screen with a vile invective on his tongue for the person who had interrupted his thinking, but paused at the sight of Point Commander Dursk. Dursk was part of the star of normal infantry who provided security and law enforcement functions for the facilities in use by Beta Galaxy. He and his fellows provided necessary and useful services, but only in extremely unusual circumstances could they be expected to have the chance to achieve any glory. Many were insular and dogmatic, isolating themselves from other warriors by contempt from MechWarriors, Pilots, and Elementals, and what they saw as an unjust denigration of the service they provided the Clan.

It was a view that Latharn understood. Many of the same people viewed the artillery the same way, and despite winning a bloodname he had found himself in a succession of artillery assignments for many long years. It was also a view that he loathed as much as he understood it because he was in a position to see just how much the lackluster support sapped from front-line elements. That the same lackluster support was what was expected by the front-line elements, was, in fact, _encouraged_ by the front-line elements, only made the whole situation ever more intolerable whenever Latharn thought about it.

Dursk, however, was bright enough that Latharn sometimes wondered if the man should not have been quietly shifted to the Scientists in his sibko. Oh, he was skilled enough to pass as Warrior, and against the _surats_ the Inner Sphere bred he was probably quite good, but aside for a few specialized units with similarly specialized training, the warriors relegated to artillery stars were mostly average at best. That, coupled with the fact that artillery stars (and those in them) were also generally ignored, went a long way to explaining why he was only a simple MechWarrior instead of a Star Commander.

Sill, he was very bright, and very creative, and probably would have made a very good member of the scientist caste. A scientist with a practical understanding of the realities that warriors faced was a very rare and valuable thing. He was also in the habit of taking more than his star's worth of initiative entirely on his own, and the fact that his ideas had more often proved brilliant than not went a long way in making up his relative lack in skill—that his superiors were half-afraid of what he would do with any _more_ initiative was the other major obstacle that kept him from rising any higher.

"Yes, Point Commander?" Latharn asked.

"We can launch two fighters," Dursk announced.

"I gave orders that the runways were not to be a priority, and no DropShip could possibly have been fully embarked yet."

"Aff, Star Captain," Dursk said. "One of the fighters, when it was being lifted, the chain to the aft-end of the lift-cradle snapped, swinging the fighter vertical. A support frame was put into place to hold it until a new lift rig could be brought over."

"Your point," Latharn said.

"Early VTOL experiments used fighters that took off vertically," Dursk said. "By putting on rockets to the after-most pod spaces, we should be able to achieve a similar result. There is a second suspension cradle that could be easily modified to a vertical launch cradle as well."

With the runways still out it would be a one-way trip, but it was an observation that both understood and neither needed to comment on. It was not the Clan way. The pilots would eject and survive, or they would not. But where to use them?

There were only three targets. He could send them after the enemy BattleMech force, he could send them after the enemy artillery force, or he could send them to clear mines for his binary. If he was on the other side the artillery batteries would be covered by at least two of those anti-air tracks that Star Captain Sumner Johns had run into the other day. Sending only two fighters against that would be suicide, and death without gain was a waste of resources. Likewise, two OmniFighters could not be expected to deal critical damage to such a large formation of BattleMechs, not BattleMechs that had proven themselves so effective.

There was another option. The command codes that would detonate the mines. Normally it would have been reserved to post-battle cleanup, or ahead of a breakout. But he could use it now to open a lane for his trapped OmniMechs to retreat through and allow his fighters to concentrate against one enemy…except that it would also give the enemy BattleMech force a clear run to the StarPort he was trying to defend.

No. Detonating the mines could not be considered an option. He did not have so many detonation frequencies and just one would be more than sufficient to leave the base exposed. Which left the fighters.

"Why the rockets? OmniFighters have sufficient thrust to break orbit on their own, quiaff?"

"Engine plasma striking the landing pad's surface would blow back and damage the fighter's armor, Star Captain. The rocket pods could be angled so that this would not be a problem."

"Do it, Point Commander," Latharn decided. "Inform the pilots that they are to load pods and external ordnance for mine-clearance operations and a secondary strike at the artillery units. Make sure that they realize the artillery is the _secondary_ target. Advise them to keep the range open to avoid being attacked by their ground-based air-defense units."

"Aff, Star Captain!" the other warrior said before the communications screen went blank.

* * *

Sumner Johns nodded in satisfaction as the crane eased the slack and the _Visigoth_ moved not at all. This was how the Clans were supposed to work, he thought enthusiastically, all the castes working together to harmony to achieve their goal. The idea for a vertical launch by one of the little-thought of security troops had been brilliant. One of the scientists who served in the aerospace fighter support team had computed the proper load and distribution of launch rockets, literally at a moment's notice. Laborers had quickly modified two cradles into launch frames and provided the skills to raise the sixty-ton OmniFighters, rotate them, and then lower them into the racks. Technicians had moved in and quickly armed and fueled the fighters despite their atypical profile.

He shifted in his seat again. The last time he had flown a _Visigoth_ it was in his Trial of Position in Clan Wolf and had ended with him ejecting, badly injured, and he had never flowing the _B_-configuration in combat before. But it was a lethal ground-attack configuration and the _Visigoth_ was vastly more mobile in atmosphere than his normal _Jagatai_ was.

A slap on his canopy shook him from his musings. Johns twisted his head 'up' to see his crew chief grasping onto a maintenance access panel while dangling from the overhead crane by a harness. The man plugged a lead into a slot, and then his voice came over the OmniFighter's intercom.

"Star Captain?"

"Aff."

"The rockets have been rigged to jettison automatically once they have completed their burn," the tech said. "Just remember, with that tail-slot empty this fighter will be slightly nose-heavy."

"I will remember," Johns assured him.

"They are pulling the last safety ribbons on your external ordnance rack right now, Star Captain. Good luck and happy hunting!" his crew chief said, reciting the ancient litany that was not quite Clan but that even the Founder himself had been unable to change, before removing the intercom lead. He patted the canopy twice, then waved up at the crane and was whisked out of sight.

"Tiamat flight, all ribbons have been pulled, umbilicals are retracted. Our tests on the rockets show green."

"One," Johns responded.

"Two." Tamm Ch'in never made it out of his fighter. Mart Mehta normally flew Bravo-One-Two on Star Commander Leo Leroux's wing, but he was a highly capable pilot and highly skilled in the use of external ordnance which most aerospace pilots regarded as little more than obsolete. It was for this reason that Johns had tapped him to replace the dead Tamm as his wingman for this flight.

"Clearing launch platform."

A distant siren wailed.

"Tiamat, you are go for launch." In the spaceport control facility a technician sat back in his chair and added, "I sure hope this works."

"Launching," Johns said, pressing the button next to the multi-function display that currently read 'ROCKET- -IGNITION'.

"Two."

A roar filled his cockpit as the rockets lit off. Almost immediately the ladder tracks along his HUD began to move as his fighter was propelled straight upwards. Johns flipped the guarded lever that would start venting plasma from the core of his fusion engine into the propulsion system, then reached for the throttle and shoved it to the full-power stops, then past the stops into overthrust.

He was slammed back into the command couch of his fighter far harder than the normal four-point-five _G_'s of overthrust would normally cause. The ladder tracks blurred at the edges of his HUD.

"_YEEE-_HAW!"

Sumner Johns cut his own cry short and punched the transmit button. "Chatter," he grunted into the circuit before releasing the control.

"Two," Mehta replied.

A moment later his navigation computer pinged.

"Rotate," Johns ordered as he began to pull back on the stick.

"Two."

As they pulled back the rocket packs detached with shuddering _bangs_ though could be felt through the spaceframe of the fighters. They rolled upright into level flight at five thousand meters.

"System check," Johns ordered, then added, "One is green."

"Two."

"Control, Tiamat flight, launch complete and on station. Proceeding with mission."

"Control copies, Tiamat flight. Control clear."


	22. Chapter 19

**Chapter 19**

"Well damn," I said as I tracked the little holographic fighters even as _Bun Bun_ tracked the real ones. "They have lanes cleared for them, then?"

"Yes," _Bun Bun_ said.

"How much of the area has been seeded?"

"Forty-two percent."

"Detection threshold?"

"At least sixty," _Bun Bun_ replied. "Probably more like ninety. We haven't put many mine-clearing rounds into the adjacent grid-boxes. It's going to be pretty obvious that some, most, of the stuff we fired was for show and that we hacked their post-battle cleanup programs and used it to command-detonate a part of the minefield."

"Boss." Even if I couldn't have identified my XO from his voice alone, _Bun Bun_ had a holographic head pop into existence off to my left.

"Go ahead, George."

"I've been thinking. What about laying down a path of lily-pads?"

"You want to _hop_ our way in?" I asked.

"At least as far as the paths they've already cleared, assuming that they're still open, maybe a bit further if necessary."

I turned the idea over for a few seconds. There were some possibilities in it, but also a few drawbacks. "It's a good idea, George, but the heavies mostly only get about ninety meters of clearance and the _Longbows_ can't jump at all. We're going to need them to take the StarPort, especially if they managed to override the hacked facility controls and start punching the droppers straight up."

"Yeah, the same thought occurred to me," George admitted. "I just don't have a better idea."

"So we only have the one option then," I said. "We use what we have and then get Merlin to blow the field early. They'll figure out what we did, but it won't help them here. Besides, there was never a great chance that they wouldn't figure out anyway."

"I don't have any better ideas besides wait until the arty is done," George agreed reluctantly, "but I don't think we can wait for that."

"Right then, _Dagger_ will advance. Marching order, _Dragon_, _Mustang_, _Raven_, _Hardhat_, _Heavy_. _Bun Bun_, sound the trot."

* * *

Viktoriya Zhukovna smiled a very cold smile indeed as she watched the tracks of the approaching fighters. Third battery had deliberately _not_ displaced after its last fire mission. In fact, it had just completed its _third_ mission from the same coordinates and now the enemy was preparing to teach it an abject lesson.

This was not the kind of thing she normally would object to. Any artillery gunner who was stupid enough to sit in one place and scream 'Shoot Me!' needed to be shot least she (or he) contaminate the gene-pool. Under normal circumstances the most she would spare would be an idle thought of 'good riddance' and use one of the SLDF-approved standard response letters to the track-commander's next-of-kin instead of the more intimate personal letters she preferred to write to survivors.

This was not the normal case however because that battery had _not_ forgotten to displace after firing. Instead it was firing from the same location for one very simple reason. She had told them to. It was still just as stupid to do as if three-battery's commander _had_ forgotten, and still just as dangerous. But this time she had a plan to make it _more_ dangerous for the enemy.

* * *

"Bandit inbound on three-battery."

"I see this, yes," she agreed. "We shall engage with attack profile _Duck Blind_. Activate linkup with two-battery. Computers to automatic."

Viki reached forward to the panel in front of her and twisted a key.

A brief tremor ran through her _Padilla_, then came the deep _thrum_ of the first launch.

SpArrow was a next-generation anti-aircraft Arrow IV missile with improved seekers, enlarged fins for making sharper movements, slightly improved range, and was the most capable anti-aircraft weapon carried by any unit not purpose-built for air-defense. Each _Padilla_ carried five, and more were carried in the ammunition tracks.

Two of Vikki's three batteries had SpArrows loaded in their number-two launchers, intended for use against lifting dropships. The other sixteen launchers in the same two batteries had been loaded with standard Arrow IV missiles in anticipation of counter-counter-battery fire, should the bait have been taken by an enemy artillery unit.

Third battery had neither in its launchers. Instead it had loaded a diverse array of decoys. Some would streak away and present a thermal and radar profile of an aerospace fighter, while others would drop EM transmitters that were designed to look like an entire battalion of mechs. In addition to the decoys, there were the usual variety of jammers, mobile ECM emitters, laser-inhibiting aerosol and radar-blocking chaff dispensers, and other devices all intended to complicate targeting the launching vehicles.

Now as the fighters lined up for runs at her third battery, Zhukovna sat back in her command chair and tightened the straps. The linked computers, running on automatic ever since she turned the key, waited a moment longer…

Sixteen launchers disgorged sixteen missiles, and her third battery disappeared in a fuzzy cloud of jamming.

"Attention Wolf pilots," the radio blasted out a message she had recorded shortly after the launch of the two fighters. "I am Captain Viktoriya Zhukovna. I command _White Witch_ artillery battery. I pledge half of my battery to your destruction. We are the _Padillas_ with W-1 through W-4 on our front left quarter panels."

* * *

Sumner Johns grinned as he shoved his throttle past the stops for standard military power all the way into the zone-five over-thrust. Three clusters of enemy vehicles were arranged on a roughly north to south line east of the Star Port. Three more clusters held almost three kilometers back from them, either additional batteries or more likely some kind of service units.

"Enemy signal identified coming from southern group."

"Two," Mart Mehta said.

There were only two ways of attacking it at this point. A sharp right turn would lead to a minimum-time pass over the target. It would limit his exposure, but also lesson his chances of killing these little annoyances in the first pass. More passes would give the rest more time to observe him and make his job of killing them all that much harder.

Instead he threw his fighter into a long loop to the left to bring his flight sweeping down out of the north.

At least this time they had forgotten to bring any of those awful air-defense tracks with them. Foolish that. Not that he was going to give them a chance to correct the mistake.

* * *

"Looks like _Duck Blind_ worked, Captain."

"Indeed it did, Jeff," Viktoriya said, watching on her screen as the woofie fighters made a long loop over her battery before heading south. She waited a moment longer, then more formally said, "Master Gunner, you may fire when ready."

* * *

The rear infra-red tracker blared as a quartet of ground-to-air missiles flung rocketed into the air behind them and angled up.

"It is a trap!"

It was one of the most obvious statements that Sumner could ever remember hearing, but that failed to make it any less true. Under the circumstances he could even forgive Mart's momentary lapse in control of his language.

He had used over-thrust minutes earlier to achieve separation between his flight and the EW-spewing battery beneath him, before throttling back which had both increased his turn radius and would give him a longer time-over-the-target profile in which to strafe. Now he shoved the throttle open again and pulled back, exchanging some velocity for additional altitude.

He looked up and twisted his head to one side to find Mart. The ground-based missiles were good, he noted. No smoke trail, relatively little thermal plume, and big, far bigger than the ones that had been used on the ground ambush of his star. Big fins for maneuverability, probably some kind of directed-thrust nozzle as well.

Mart threw his fighter into a barrel roll. The first missile lost its track and sailed past the _Visigoth_, missing the twisting fighter by scant meters, and the proximity warhead failing to detonate. The second missile ate a flare and exploded well clear of the Clan OmniFighter, and the corner of Sumner John's brain that was concerned about such things added 'big warhead' to the anti-aircraft missile's specifications. Then Mart slammed his own throttle to the max. The missile that had been right behind him hadn't counted on this and its proximity detonator blew the warhead as fusion-plasma was vented over it. The explosion skewed the fighter slightly and blasted its tail with fragments, but the armor held, as it did when the fourth missile hit.

The _Visigoth'_s tail was thrown up by the blast. The other pilot recovered effortlessly, but four more missiles had followed the first quartet by bare seconds, and a third salvo was already streaking into the air. The OmniFighter's nose pitched up and over, and Sumner Johns knew that Mart must have disabled his alpha-limiter. The nose tipped over, opposite to the fighter's direction of travel as thrust reversers redirected most of the exhaust plasma forward and up or below the Clan Wolf OmniFighter.

Extended-range lasers flashed and two of the missiles exploded in mid-air. Even by Clan standards it was a pair of spectacular hits. Then Mart broke into a sharp dive as he regularized his flight profile. The third missile missed a direct hit, over-flying the evading OmniFighter and exploded behind it, once more peppering the rear quarter with shrapnel.

The last missile was an orphan. The electronic bus responsible for transferring targeting information hadn't seated itself properly when it had been loaded into the launcher and there had been a brief, but very real delay, until the information could be uploaded. It had still launched less than half of a second late, but that time gave it spacing. It tracked the evading OmniFighter, dismissed two targets that had appeared in the narrow cone of its seeker as decoy flares, and focused on a tiny target that appeared slightly warmer than the rest. This target, though the seeker head neither knew nor cared, was over the fusion plant of the _Visigoth_, in full view of the sun, and exposed to not inconsiderably friction as the OmniFighter blasted its way through the air.

As Star Captain Johns watched, the missile seemed to bobble in flight and duck under Mart's fighter. For a moment he thought Mart had evaded this one as well, then a fireball seemed to swallow the underside of the fighter. It flew out of the fireball raining destroyed ablative armor plating. He knew that the fighter had more than enough armor there that the missile hadn't reached anything critical barring a truly unlucky strike, but many MechWarriors forgot that the quantity of armor alone was not enough to assure an OmniFighter's protection. In space, of course this was still the case. But in atmosphere, fighters of any kind still were subject to the ancient forces of gravity and drag. If the flight surfaces or aerodynamic stability were compromised, all the armor in the Clans would not keep a fighter from crashing.

Sumner Johns' own fighter came to the top of its loop and he pulled back even more sharply into the dive. He was still far outside of normal range, but the altitude would give his missiles additional flight time. They would have to glide in on their targets and their mobility after their engines burned out would be insufficient if the target moved, but it was apparent from the computer plotting the missiles to their launch location that the launching tracks were sitting still. Sumner Johns selected one computer-highlighted _Padilla_ and chose EXTENDED ENGAGEMENT PROFILE from the target/engagement list. Targeting cues traced across his HUD as he lifted the nose slightly in relation to the horizon. The computer chose the optimum moment and the first salvo from his LRM-20 rippled off just as a _fourth_ flight of missiles launched.

"Status?"

"Damage to rear and dorsal armor, slight damage to left-rear flight surfaces," Mart replied. "Go high, Wolfman, I will keep them interested in me. We force them to expend all of their missiles, and then we finish them off."

It was hardly an honorable tactic.

"Aff," Sumner agreed.

It was, after all, a _prudent_ tactic. All the same, he made a note to have the battle-roms suffer some 'battle damage' before the saKhan could review them.

* * *

"All right, I've had enough dicking around out here," I said. "Merlin, blow the field and lock down those droppers. Let's _go_ people, I want to be done in time for supper."


	23. Chapter 20

**Chapter 20**

Little red streaks hung in the holographic 'sky' before me.

"Damn," I muttered.

"Incoming artillery," _Bun Bun_ added its two bits.

"Open com. _Dagger_, scatter."

There was a limited amount of space a unit the size of my little task force could scatter itself in without running into mines on either side of our cleared lane. But there should be more than enough space to keep us from bunching up too closely together.

"Arrow?" I asked, this directed to _Bun Bun_. "Can we intercept?"

_Bun Bun_'s tactical/intelligence programs chewed over the question and the data-take from its sensors for a second or two.

I expected the answer to both to be 'yes'. By now I'd had seen more than enough artillery tracks, both real (in the case of missiles) and holographic, that I was able to pick out the launcher without trouble. Likewise the laser point-defense systems most of _Dagger_'s units were equipped with would set up and interlocking grid of protection that would target any missile approaching with multiple laser bursts. Even if one or even two _leopards_ missed the incoming barrage lacked the density to get through the rest.

"Negative," _Bun Bun_ said at last. "They're Arrow IV missiles all right, but they're putting the missiles up and letting them drop in on ballistic. The onboard radars of most of our units just aren't accurate enough against something that small flying unpowered. Under power, yes, but not without."

"_Mustang_-Six, _Ramrod_."

"Go ahead Sergeant-Major," I responded.

"Sir, suggest slaving the laser point-defense system to IR sensors."

"They're flame-out, Sar-Major," I observed.

"Yes, sir," he agreed. "But there's still sunlight reflecting off their bodies and the flight surfaces should have heated up from friction, not to mention the fire-cans from rocket exhaust. Even if there's no drive-plume there should be some residual trace."

"Do it. _Bun Bun_—"

"Transmitting…engagement profile updated, Task Force _Dagger_. Estimate effectiveness...twenty-six percent."

It was better than nothing, but not by much.

"_Dagger_, _White Witch_-Six."

"Go, _Witch_," I said with not a little surprise.

The woofies had killed my drone, but I had sent up the second and I wasn't the only person to be carrying them. It had only taken one overflight to confirm that the runways were still inoperable. Somehow, despite that and the dropships that Merlin had locked down, the woofies had managed to put almost thirty fighters into the air.

At least some of them had been equipped with rapid-fire point-defense guns and used as anti-missile escorts. No such weapon had been observed in use by them before so they had to have at least another squadron of heavy fighters on the ground. Whether or not they would be able to launch them as well was anyone's guess. With the escorts to protect them against anti-aircraft missile fire, the follow-on units had bombed and strafed all three artillery batteries very heavily. Until now I hadn't thought any had survived.

"I have seven _Pads_ and two spear-carriers left from the total force. All SpArrow and decoy ammunition expended or lost. Awaiting strike orders."

"Take cover and hold."

"Wilco, out."

So I had some combat capability that they didn't expect. That they, in fact, (probably) thought they had wiped out. And I also had a straight line of advance directly into the starport.

They had nine (probably ten given apparent organization conventions in use, but we had only observed nine) mechs armed with Arrow-IV artillery launchers, and more than two dozen aerospace fighters circling just outside of our engagement range. Of course, those fighters had already taken at least some damage, expended all of their external ordnance and probably a good quantity of their internal ordnance, and sooner or later fuel was going to become an issue.

I'd half-expected them to come in piecemeal, engaging individual targets the way they had before. Instead they had made exactly one pass in which Dietrich and Oakley—the other _Rifleman_ driver—had ripped the wings off two of the fighters with the kind of negligent, remorseless ease that a child uses to rip wings off of butterflies. If whoever was in charge over there was smart, and he probably was, he was holding the fighters back and wouldn't commit them until he had us occupied with his artillery fire.

"_Dagger_, close up formation to _leopard_ support range."

The LPDS had two engagement modes. The first was much like any point-defense system in that if it detected missiles heading at the unit that equipped it, the LPDS would try to shoot them down. While this was just fine against LRMs and SRMs, it left something to be desired against Arrow artillery as a cagey commander would have his spotters designate ground adjacent to the true target. The damage wouldn't be as great as a direct hit, but the lasers wouldn't interdict it so there was a better chance of the missiles getting through.

The second engagement profile had been developed with this in mind. Equipped units would move close together, and the LPDS on each equipped mech or tank would engage any missile targeted within sixty meters of the equipped unit. As it turned out this system was also highly effective against massed indirect LRM attacks, and as a bonus, infantry, armor, and other unequipped units could move under the protective cover of the interdiction zone. At the same time the downsides were obvious. Bunched so closely together we were prime targets for any tube artillery, and lined up like nice little targets for a strafing run should a pilot get it into his mind to try.

"_Longrifle_, load frags and take targeting cues from _Shotgun_." The limited stocks of fragmentation missiles carried by _Longrifle_ were better suited to soft targets like infantry, but we'd long-since adapted them to include and airburst-detonator so they functioned much like an autocannon cluster round.

"Sound the gallop."

Gallop was both one step below charge and completely different. A charge was a kind of attack, while gallop was an indication of speed. If the enemy was distant a 'charge' would have every mech running at flank, and coming in piecemeal. There were times when this was necessary, but often it invited defeat in detail which was something most people tried to avoid. If the enemy was close a charge would be at the task group's best speed—quite different from the individual mech's best speed—and put the units with the heaviest armor and weapons in front with the intent of smashing through the enemy formation for the lighter units to exploit.

A gallop was simply the task group's best speed. In this case the slowest units were the _Longbows_ and they held us to just over a hundred klicks per hour. At the two-point-six kilometers to the fence that delineated the extreme border of the spaceport it meant that even moving at a gallop would still take us nearly a minute and a half to get inside the spaceport. And the artillery-mechs weren't hunkered down just inside the border. Plus, the spaceport included the usual warehouses, transshipment centers, passenger concourses, maintenance facilities, and all the other infrastructure one expected around a spaceport.

"Splash," _Bun Bun_ warned a moment before point-defense lasers whined.

Missile bodies shattered, ripped to splinters by the sudden energy transfer imparted by the lasers. The energy transfer was too sudden and violent, and in any case, of the wrong kind, to detonate the warheads on its own. That did not mean, however, that an electrical short of one kind or another couldn't activate detonators, and we were showed with fragments as explosions went off above us.

The Sergeant-Major had been right. Using IR for targeting cues did help improve the accuracy of the LPDS. Switching to the support engagement profile helped some more, at least in that every missile was targeted more than once.

But missiles still got through.

One mech in the section of Combat Engineers disappeared inside a fireball. Vinh Tran's _Longbow_ took a hit dead center that stripped off much the armor and left base metal gleaming. Light codes played over _Dragon_ and _Heavy_ companies as more mechs were damaged. Then the world lurched sideways.

Fur burned away on _Bun Bun_'s holographic bunny avatar. Skin blistered and cracked. Muscle gleamed a sickly red against charred flesh.

"Incoming fighters, _Dragon_-Three-Two."

"_Shotgun_, _Backstop_ on your mark, Goose Killer."

"_Jawohl_, _mein herr_," Dietrich said. Then, his accent fading just as quickly as he had turned it on, "_Backstop_ units. _Shotgun_. Execute on my mark…"

He seemed to leave it hang at that for an impossibly long time. The woofie fighters had formed up and were preparing to dive in at us.

"_Mark!_"

The _Rifleman_-equipped air-defense section, along with every light- and medium-mech armed with an extended-range laser or PPC in both _Dragon_ and _Heavy_ companies (aside from those piloted by company commanders and first sergeants) stopped in place. Those units that had been carrying remote point-defense platforms in their mission-support packs dropped them, and more drones took to the skies with chaff and decoys, or, in the case of two recon drones, flew right at the incoming fighters.

Zorro, the only remaining CyberPunk in _Dagger_ after the detachment of Merlin, also stopped. His cybernetic-warfare mech would improve the _Backstop_ components' chances of survival, but his real purpose was in weapons control.

* * *

Hans Dietrich was in his element. Where other air-defense experts would consider ways to protect and cover the rest of the ground force, he was looking at a target-rich environment of his very favorite of targets. Aerospace fighters who did not have a clue at what was to come. In its own way it was a very clan-like attitude, not that he knew it.

Every unit in the _Backstop_ covering force had been designated for and briefed on this very mission profile before ever leaving the dropship, and all had carried mission support packs that, with one exception, were designed to support his air-defense section. Now, while two of the Combat Engineering 'mechs initiated a backburn to clear them an area to fight in, the rest of _Backstop_ spread out and began to deploy their MSPs.

Each of the two _Crab_s deployed a remote _Sparrowhawk_ missile pack and the two _Lynx_es had a twin medium-laser turret with a built-in LPDS mount. Zorro's _Prowler_ carried a trio of remote LPDS units, while Lieutenant Ralph Packhurst's _Phoenix Hawk_ carried nine remote sensor platforms/transmitter beacons. The other _Phoenix Hawk_ assigned to _Backstop_ had been piloted by Adrienne Hensley, _Heavy_-One-One, who had been wounded and evacuated earlier and so was not present, cut into the redundancy of the sensor/beacons somewhat, but not enough to worry Hans.

The heaviest weapons had been carried by the two _Rifleman_ and _Night Hawk_ mechs. Hans' mech carried the turret base, control computer, and ammunition for one MetalStorm-series class-10 rotary autocannon, while Annie's carried the barrel/breech assemblies. Zorro, who had the only mech with hands, began to assemble the weapon while each of the _Night Hawk_s deployed a launcher for SpArrow-series air-defense missiles.

The normal Arrow IV launcher massed fifteen tons. By removing the missile-feed mechanism, mounting brackets use to secure the device inside of a mech or vehicle, completely removing the capability for withstanding multiple 'hot' launches, and making other changes, it was just possible to build and load a five-tube one-shot launcher on a turret mount and have it mass only a sixth of the weight of the standard launcher. All five missiles had to be launched in one go, as the exhaust from even one missile would destroy the launcher and detonate any missiles left inside of it.

For this reason, and because the launcher had to remain under the direct control of a mech (the launcher had no internal targeting mechanism, but a self-deploying hardline was sufficient for the task) it was unlikely to ever prove a useful standard artillery weapon. Most mechs simply could not support long-range artillery attack profiles without some serious programming that was a hindrance in an occasionally-deployed one-shot weapon. Expense and usefulness in only limited situations with no way to reconfigure a load without stopping at an armory would prevent them from ever carrying smoke, illumination, and other specialty rounds. But an air-defense missile could be run simply by modifying the programming for use of an LRM-5 against air-targets, and took up relatively little in the way of memory. Better yet, against a ground target five arrow missiles could quickly prove wasteful, but against a fast-moving aerial target that was able to carry heavier armor than most BattleMechs, it could prove quite useful, and the SpArrow's blast-fragmentation warhead could make even near-misses count for something.

Hans watched the rainbow-hued lines streak across the sky as the fighters broke off their attack on _Dagger_ and started to circle on him. "What do you think, Sepp?" he asked.

The holographic German shepherd sitting next to his command chair cocked its head, one ear, its tip missing, flopped back comically as its tongue from its mouth. "No bag limit?" the dog asked.

"That's my boy," Hans agreed with a hungry grin. After almost a decade and a half 'Sepp' had become more real to him than the dog he had named the avatar after.

"TacNav?"

"Tactical Navigation Grid is…optimal," Sepp said.

The TacNav used the constantly broadcasted signals from each of the beacons laid down by Packhurst to firmly fix a mech's location. It's range wasn't very great, but as long as a mech stayed within range of at least three beacons (preferably four or five) the DIs could calculate the mech's location with enough exactitude to almost entirely negate the uncertainties of shooting from a moving platform.

"Radar?"

"Radar's up."

"AVIX?"

"Good connectivity."

"Go laser-com on AVIX."

AVIX, or the Automated Vehicular Information Exchange was to the Terran Hegemony units as a whole what ARES was to the individual soldier. A robust, distributed, tactical network that 'shared' any information with any unit within two and a half kilometers (even more for deserts and open plains like the one they were in, but less for thick forests or mountains). Frequency-agile micro-burst transmitters that were hard to DF and almost impossible to stop were used to transfer data-packets between units, and each unit could easily rebroadcast others.

Admittedly, the technology to do that had existed for centuries. But it had taken a new generation of transmitters to get ahead of developments in electronic warfare to make effective data-transmission possible. A new type of computer data-processing core that was capable of processing the 'take' and turning it into something useful for the MechWarrior (or tank driver, or artillery gunner, or whomever) was required to help prevent data-overflow, a task only complicated by each individual often having different requirements in what or how they wanted things presented. Finally, a new way of actually presenting that information (ARES) to allow the individual soldier to concentrate on the job at hand without his or her attention being sucked in two-dozen different directions at once.

Laser-com would restrict the range of AVIX (not an issue in this case), and eliminate the potential intermittent transmission that might be detected (also not an issue in this case, but it would significantly reduce data-transmission time while also boosting data transmission rate. AVIX's primary usefulness was in the instantaneous dissemination of recon intelligence and for spotting artillery/LRM fire. In this case it allowed all seven of the lighter mechs (the _Prowler_ was effectively unarmed except for its massive ECM gear) to tap into the Improved Garret D2j (still the best ground-air attack radar, the Improved models had bleeding-edge components but were otherwise unchanged) radars carried by the two _Rifleman_ air-defense mechs.

Actually, AVIX improved the amazing accuracy slightly. By displacing both of the _Rifleman_s he increased their chance of survivability somewhat, and neatly set up both radars for a bistatic search/track/attack sequence, much like a human's natural bifocal vision was better for judging distances than one eye working alone. And, more importantly, the computers carried by Zorro's _Prowler_ that were needed to drive the massive ECM emitter arrays were more powerful than was strictly necessary to accomplish that task. There were a variety of reasons why having the extra computing power around would be helpful for someone whose specialty by, definition, was cybernetic warfare. In this case the extra processing power actually allowed all of the seven smaller mechs to make full use of those same radars.

_And_, Hans thought to himself, _those poor woofie bastards don't know a thing about it._

* * *

_Stick is a little stiff_, Sumner Johns thought to himself, but it was probably psychosomatic rather than real. All _Visigoths _were supposed to be exactly like every other produced. The same had been true of all war-machines for a millennium or more. It had also been true over the same length of time that the warriors who actually _used_ those machines knew that it was a lie.

Seldom was there ever anything specific that a Pilot or MechWarrior could point to and say 'that, that is what makes this fighter or that OmniMech unique from that one over there'. And, like most Pilots, MechWarriors, and Elementals, he felt…slightly out of place—not just in a _Visigoth_, he had flown one and flown it well for years and remained fully qualified in it—but in a fighter that was subtly different from the _Visigoth_ he had used before. Not that it could be helped.

His right knee ached and he grunted, taking his hand off the throttle long enough to give it a squeeze. The knee had been injured when he had bailed out in the same Trial that had cost him his right arm. Despite making a full recovery he still felt an occasional twinge, and he wondered if he shouldn't have let the flight surgeon check him out the way the scientist had wanted to before he had gotten back in the cockpit.

Unlike many of his fellow warriors Sumner Johns had a very healthy respect for the medical sub-caste scientists and technicians. He had seen far too many of his fellows suffer inglorious fates after ignoring medical advice, their deeds forgotten and genetic legacies cast aside in favor of those of greater—or at least somewhat longer lived—warriors.

And that had been before they had entirely replaced his right arm following his Trial of Position into Clan Wolf.

Latharn Feltladral, however, had wanted him to lead the attack and the only proper place for him to do that was the cockpit of an OmniFighter. As an equal-ranked Star Captain—and not one consigned to command artillery troops—he could have insisted on a Trial of Refusal and, if he won, decline to go. The Clans would allow another Clan to settle such internal dissention without interference, and most of the Inner Sphere, it seemed, was incapable of offering interference. Against _these_ warriors, however, he had come to the conclusion that they would take any opportunity, offered or incidental and honorable or not, and use it to their full advantage.

Unfortunately not all of his fellow warriors had come to the same conclusions, and Star Command Jall Ch'in, who commanded the Command Fighter Star of the Silver Keshik, had promised to destroy the delaying force with just her star.

So he had acquiesced rather than fight the Trial she had threatened. But at the same time he filed away her blistering retort with its accusations of cowardice and incompetence and slurs on his genetic heritage and Blood Legacy. When the time came he would issue a Trial of Grievance and she would not survive it.

Still…

The force below him did not have any of the strange aircraft, and the weapon load-outs of most of the BattleMechs had been calculated and none of them seemed to carry any of the Anti-Aircraft Arrow Artillery missiles that had made those _Padilla_s so very effective. There, at least, his little aerial armada had followed his decision and launched with heavy external ordnance loads that they had expended at long range before closing in. A

If he had had his way, his almost four complete stars of OmniFighters would have set up for multiple enveloping strikes to split their fire while pounding the BattleMechs into submission before continuing after the main force. Or, perhaps, he would have bypassed the trailing group entirely and gone after the leaders? Yes, that made far more sense. Instead of doing either, however, Jall was setting up for a long, leisurely strafing pass that would give her star the maximum time to pound them in a single pass. That was, almost certainly, a mistake, Johns knew. These BattleMechs were likely the ones with the most potent anti-air capability, and unlike Jall who planned for every fighter to take its own target in keeping with _Zellbrigen_ (actually, far more conservative than honor required since two fighters formed a single point compared to the single BattleMech), they would be concentrating on only a few targets unless he was much mistaken.

They had fired the prairie and had quite effectively hidden themselves from vision inside a pall of smoke. ECM was a bit better than what the artillery batteries had produced, but there were no massive clouds of chaff. There were also multiple emission sources, a dozen or so seemed to be simple broadcast stations of no practical value, too easy to detect and too low bandwidth for data transmission, impossible to block but that was it.

His Radar Warning Receiver bleeped, and his _Visigoth_'s computer chewed it over for a moment before identifying a pair of modified Garret D2j radars. Well, there _were_ a pair of _Rifleman_ BattleMechs down there and after all this time it would have been surprising if some improvements had not been made, or more likely, scavenged non-standard parts used for repairs.

Below him Jall went wing-over into a bank and chopped back her throttle as she led her star in.

* * *

"Analysis, Sepp?"

"Four _Firebirds_, two each of _Freestyle, Fatman, and Flatbed_s," the holographic dog said.

Hans nodded. The woofies seemed to use four distinct fighters with two or three variants of each. The _Freestyle_ was relatively light (estimated 55-65 tons) compared to the others and highly maneuverable, while the _Fatman_ massed somewhere between 75 and ninety tons and flew like a lumbering brick. _Flatbed_ was a huge monster that just asked for a bomber-variant, but that seemed to be against the woofies' tactical doctrine. The _Firebirds _were between the _Freestyle_ and _Fatman_ in size, had a good balance of maneuverability and weapons payload, and seemed to be the woofies' favored fighter.

Ten fighters fit with their observed preference for a base-5 lance/platoon level organization. Command still wasn't certain if they deployed a two-fighter element in the same way their armored-infantry deployed five-suit squads, or if ten fighters comprised two squadrons. In this case it really didn't matter.

It was also, Hans thought, rather stupid. If _he'd_ been in charge he'd have RTB'd—if possible with the runways denied them, but they had gotten up into the air somehow so presumably they had a way back down—to reload with more external ordnance and then swarm him at once and bomb the shit out of him…or bypass the obvious air-defense unit entirely to blast the shit out of _Dagger_.

"Formation Bravo-2," he said. He had developed a number of formations that did not describe unit position so much as who was going to fire at what. Alpha, for example, concentrated _Backstop_'s fire on a single target. Bravo split the _Crab_s, _Night Hawk_s, and _Lynx_es between his and Annie's _Rifleman_ air-defense mechs, and set up Packhurst to control the deployed mission support packs. '2' added that those units that could be mobile should be, and to use the TacNav to help augment their fire control.

"Arrow batteries to engage the _Fatman_s from the rear." They were his single heaviest punch and it behooved him to make it count, hence the decision to risk losing them to a stray enemy shot in order to present them with the easiest targets where their armor was thinnest. He briefly contemplated sending them after the _Flatbeds_, but decided the surer destruction imparted by the lesser maneuverability offset the possibility of taking out a heavier target, and each battery could only engage one target so he wouldn't gain much if he threw them at the _Freestyles_.

"Spin the guns."

"Spinning," Sepp said as the MetalStorm-5 rotary autocannons spun up. "Target designation?"

"Pick us a _Freestyle_."

"_Freestyle_ locked in…Annie's designated a _Flatbed_."

"Designate _Freestyle_-deuce and hand-off to Packhurst," Hans said as he toggled a control on the stick with his right middle finger. "Okay, _Backstop_, this is it. Everyone monitor your heat levels, now would be a very bad time to go into heat lock. We're only getting one pass with the SpArrows so we're gonna hold 'em until they pull out, then slam them up the tailpipes of those fat bastards. The cannon Annie and I set down, and the _sparrowhawk_ packs are going to give us a half-dozen passes at best, but we'll take what we can get. We don't know what variants they'll hit us with, but our priorities are in your comps. If they have any clue at all they'll swarm us after the first pass, but I'm betting they won't. That means we'll get to chew up this first group for free before the other bastards try to chew us up.'

"Low and slow, Boss," Sepp said. "Engineers are clear, on their way to rejoin _Dagger_ at a dead run."

"Good," Hans said, edging his mech up into a trot and swiveled the torso as the gun mounts elevated. He reached out into the holographic ether, pulling a single fighter into closer view until it filled the cockpit. "Slave-lock."

There was a beep as the control sticks began to move on their own, as the torso and weapons were taken over by Sepp.

"Got 'em," the dog growled just before the basso-whine of the rapid-firing MetalStorm cannons filled the cockpit.

* * *

_Snow Owl_-Two-One—the Command Fighter Star was allowed to use its unit's nickname for a radio handle—was piloted by Dorrick of Blood House Leroux. He was young for his posting. In fact, he had only tested out as a Warrior after the conclusion of the Periphery wave. Originally he had been a very junior addition to an advanced training sibko that had been brought along in the Invasion force to provide pilots for the various ship-to-planet and ship-to-ship shuttles that would be needed for the logistic side of the invasion. Along the journey to the Inner Sphere he had come to the notice of no less a pilot than Star Captain Sumner Johns who had privately inducted the young pilot to _his_ version of pilot training.

Even for a Pilot of the Clans he was considered young for his posting.

He was also extremely good. All of his instructors had told him so. Even before Star Captain Johns had started training him most had trouble out-flying him, and after none could keep up. That he was only a Pilot-Second, forced to fly as wingman instead of leading his own Point or even commanding a star, was due to pilot-trainee Cawti foolishly initiating a melee. She had not survived the experience. _Dorrick_ had lived, but he had had to be cut out of his cockpit, so badly was it damaged. And while he had made but a single kill, he had also damaged all of his opponents, including pounding two other fighters (both heavier than his) so badly that even though their pilots had brought them back after his own fighter was destroyed the technicians had been forced to write them off as scrap.

But for all of his skill, he was woefully inexperienced against ground attack. Having left Clan Space long before his Trial of Position, he had never had to face a BattleMech with anything other than, at-best, antiquated systems. Even if he had, the Clans had no equivalent of MetalStorm, but that was beside the point. The point was that he believed in the inherent superiority of himself and his machine over anything that was confined to the lowly ground. And he believed in the inherent superiority of himself and his machine over anything the Inner Sphere could produce.

He believed these things because every experience he had, both were perfectly true. Nothing on the ground stood a chance against him—especially not with the _Visigoth B_ which had four forward-firing large pulse lasers and had been specifically designed for ground-attack.

And because these facts were true it was not completely unreasonable for the first conclusion he jumped to when the first of what seemed like three-score flak rounds (it was actually a little under a sixth of that) started to go off around his fighter was that every BattleMech had chosen to open fire on him.

Still, he was a very good pilot and so managed to avoid one of the more common mistakes that had been made by fighter pilots over the previous millennium.

To generate increased thrust, whether from a conventional fighter or a fusion-powered Aerospace Fighter, engines were required an increase the pressure of the exhaust products. This was generally done by pumping more fuel into the engines. But there is a limit to even the most advanced engine of how much thrust it could create. A millennium before reheat, or afterburner as it was commonly known, was created. This involved nothing more than spraying fuel into the hot engine exhaust before it left the tail-can of the fighter.

It was at this point that it was discovered that there were certain design tolerances that could not be worked around, namely the operating pressure of the chamber where the fuel was sprayed into. The simple solution was an adaptive tail-can that could widen itself just enough to drop the pressure levels to something it could handle.

An unfortunate number of pilots over the previous millennia had found themselves in situations they would rather not be in while close to the ground and reached for the throttle which they shoved into afterburner mode. In air-combat this actually made sense. But in their final moments those same pilots had remembered that the tail-can needed to adjust _before_ additional fuel could be injected. This momentarily _dropped_ the pressure of exhaust. With the drop in pressure came a corresponding drop in thrust.

This alone was not an instantly fatal mistake, but far too many of those pilots had pulled back on their sticks trying desperately to gain altitude to get away from the Bad Things on the ground that they had discovered, quite unexpectedly, to not at all appreciate being attacked from above.

The result in change in angle of attack caused a loss in lift, coupled with a loss of thrust, this tended to end in the less-than-satisfactory event known in the colloquial as a 'crash'.

But Dorrick of Blood House Leroux was a good pilot, and had had excellent trainers. Even better, Sumner Johns believed in learning from others and so Dorrick had found himself in similar situations in simulators before. Especially since he could not expect the degenerate spheroids to show proper battlefield manners. So instead of panicking, he advanced the throttles, but only to the check-stops that guarded the over-thrust zones, and forced himself to hold the flight stick level.

It was hard to see visually as he entered the smoke of the burning prairie, but he noticed a number of rockets ahead, possibly a battery of Arrow missiles like those carried by the artillery unit that had proven so effective, or perhaps ordinary LRMs. In either case, by flying closer to the ground he'd force them to move faster to track on him and there was a good chance that any radar hits they got on him could be lost in the ground clutter. He pushed the stick forward slightly, dropping himself down to less than a hundred meters.

Something slammed into him and universe went insane.

* * *

Laura Gilligan was having a very bad day.

In fact, it wouldn't have been wrong to say that she'd been having them for over half her life.

Her parents had been a pair of the rare Periphery-born members of the SLDFMC, who had joined with aspirations of reforming the League's attitudes towards the Periphery from the inside. She'd been celebrating her fourteenth Christmas when the assault transports of Amaris' first attempt to take Carver V had lit the sky. Within three months she had killed her first person, three months later she tacked on her first solo 'mech kill. By her seventeenth birthday she had long stopped counting, which was when a small task force made up of captured ships lifted her and most of the other surviving dependants off the planet. By that time her father was dead, and her mother had been captured and not seen or heard of again.

She'd tried to enlist, only to be told that the SLDF Ground Forces Command wasn't interested. Force to kill at so young an age. The horrors she'd been forced to witness. Loss of her parents. Severe psychological trauma. Inability to properly cope. But despite Kerensky's head-shrinkers she'd found a spot in the Cavalry and done pretty well.

But then the universe had played its cruelest prank.

They had won, dammit. Everything was supposed to be better. Amanda would take over as First Lord, and she was the smart, devious sort who would put the damn voting-lords in their places and bring in the 'territorial members' as full voting members to break the grip of the five great houses. Everything her parents had hoped and died for was there. The oppressive taxation and brutal economic progroms, the flat-out stupid educational requirements designed to indoctrinate the children of the Periphery, all of it would be gone, overturned.

And instead she'd found herself in a future even more dystopian than the past she'd left, under attack by technologically-advanced marauders and pirates, and on the very first day two of her closest friends, people who'd she'd shared every triumph and disaster with for _years_, had been killed.

She was riding the edge of a breakdown. They all were, and given the situation they couldn't really be blamed for it. They were all tightly wound. None of them had really had the time or opportunity to properly decompress from liberating Earth, never mind a two and half century temporal displacement. But someone had to give first.

So perhaps it could be understood why the former teen who had enjoyed surfing in the tropical waters of Carver V's Teufelhunden Lagoon attempted to perform one of the more infamous BattleMech attacks on an AeroSpace Fighter in mid-flight.

Laura laid the whole thing in by eye and instinct. Her _Night Hawk_'s jump jets took it a hundred twenty meters straight up before she ended the burn. It hung for a moment before gravity overcame its residual velocity, and she only goosed the jets again at ninety meters before slamming down onto the back of Dorrick's _Visigoth._

The _Night Hawk _lacked hand actuators. In fact, it even lacked arms, but the fighter had its main wings set far back on the fuselage and there was an oddly shaped tail structure above it. So when she came down she bent her mech at the knees and before she quite realized what she had done, her mech was sitting relatively securely on the back of the fighter.

Someone was shouting in her ear, but she ignored it as inconsequential.

The fighter she was riding had never been designed with the possibility that someone might try to land a thirty-five-ton mech on its back and so it tilted wildly upwards. It threw off her center of gravity and she compensated by leaning her mech 'forward' so that its chest was against the fighter's spine.

Just as the fighter hadn't been designed with the maneuver in mind, the engine wasn't capable of lifting both the fighter and its passenger. It stood for a moment on its tail, then tipped and headed for the ground.

As soon as she felt it start to go Laura kicked with her mech's knees, and triggered and alpha strike. For a moment thirty-five tons of war machine was balanced on a tail assembly never meant to hold it.

Then, with a crunch, the tail let go and Laura found herself alone in the air and stomped the jump jet pedals for all she was worth.

She was almost in time.

* * *

"I'm going to court-martial her," Hans growled.

"She has to live through it first," Annebelle Oakley in _Longrifle-_Two said philosophically.

"I don't care. I'll court-martial a scrap of bloody shirt if I have to. That girl is insane."

"We're all of us insane some of us just haven't realized it yet," Sepp opined.

"Major Talbot may let _Bun Bun_ get away with talking like that, you are not named or programmed after a demented psychopathic mini-lop," Hans said coldly.

"Yes, Boss."

Hans glared across the holographic 'field' where an ash-streaked mech was struggling to its feet. "Report, _Dragon_-three-two."

"I'm okay," the voice was distant, worn.

A part of Hans regretted his tone, but he stomped it down firmly. Survive today, apologize tomorrow. "Your mech?" he asked coolly.

"Extensive shock damage. Micro-fractures in the structure of the right leg. Right foot actuator sprung a seal, the second toe locked down automatically. My gyro-tumbled, but it's halfway through a field realignment under DI control and seems undamaged. Some damage to mirror alignment in my laser, but my DI says it can compensate. I am functional."

* * *

Sumner Johns paused as a _Visigoth _came out of the pall of smoke in an uncontrolled roll, one of its wings completely shot away. It arced towards the ground like a javelin tossed in a field-sport competition. A roll that tight had to be nausea-inducing, but its pilot managed to time his fighter's roll perfectly. The canopy blew off while the fighter was still on its side, and the seat rocketed out as the fighter rolled level.

A second _Visigoth_ didn't appear. Two _Krighiz_ followed the lone _Visigoth_, one trailing splinters of shattered armor. Four _Jagatai_s, no visible damage, and then two lumbering _Jengiz_, the same.

Two OmniFighters and damaged a third. It was every bit of impressive as he had anticipated it would be.

He started to query Star Commander Jall Ch'in of what success her star had had, but paused as rockets streaked out of the smoke.

No, not rockets. More of those damnable air-defense Arrow IV missile variants. Five tracked effortlessly in on each of the _Jengiz_. The fighters were too slow to accelerate, too unwieldy to throw into an effective break…and too low to dive for speed. One pilot ejected before his fighter was even hit. The other fighter disappeared into a massive fireball as one missile after another exploded into its back, the last actually disappearing inside the fighter before it exploded

"Star Captain," Jall's face was like brittle iron on the communications screen on the left side of his cockpit. "I break my bid and request—"

"No, Star Commander," Johns said mildly. "I would not dream of insisting that you use a force that you have no faith in the ability of. You may, of course, concede the attack, if you wish?"

Jall looked at him from his com-panel's small screen in undisguised shock. Breaking her bid would be bad enough. Conceding would be effectively admitting that she was an idiot and that she had allowed ego to get the better of her judgment and had resulted in needless damage to expensive OmniFighters and the loss of their pilots and all of the resources spent training them.

All of which were true, of course. But it would also be seen as an admission that the spheroids had bettered the military might of the Clans.

It would have taken a big warrior to admit the first points, and while Sumner Johns privately believed that most of Clan Wolf was built of the stuff that _could_ make that concession, Jall Ch'in had always seemed to him to be…brittle when it came to pride.

Sort of like a smoked jaguar, he thought. Perhaps some abtahka warrior genes in her lineage? It would make an interesting diversion sometime during the tedious time spent recharging a JumpShip's KF-drive.

But the second point? He wondered if there was any warrior in all the clans who would get himself involved in such a disaster _and_ concede the second point. _Perhaps Khan Ulric_, he decided, _he always did seem a bit larger than life_.

"Neg," Jall said in a hard voice. "Star Captain," she added his rank and closed the channel.

* * *

_That could have been worse_, Hans thought as he stared at the color-coded outlines of the mechs of his little force. Laura's restricted mobility was probably the worst damage they had taken, but he had only two mechs that hadn't been hit at all. Jessie Lockridge's _Lynx_ had taken a near-miss to the head from a flak cannon and had banged her head badly, and Zorro's _Prowler_ had caught a pair of hits in the torso over the precious electronic warfare equipment bays. The armor had held, but only barely. Still, he'd taken down four fighters, damaged a fifth, and for all of that he'd lost some armor.

"That could have been worse," Sepp said. "They're in a long casual racetrack looking to angle in again."

"So I see. The remote MetalStorm cannon?"

"Jammed, and yes, we already tried to remote unjam it by backing the motor. It didn't work. Zorro is already heading out to try cycling it by hand."

"I can take my own messages, Sepp."

"Just trying to uncomplicated your life, Boss."

"We'll go with four engagement groups this time," Hans said. "Transfer the _Lynx_es to Packhurst and have him displace since we don't need someone to mind the Arrow launchers anymore. Give him a 'well-done' for me."

"Target priorities?"

"Parkhurst's team takes the damaged _Flatbed_, Annie and the remote weapon platforms get the undamaged one. We'll take one of the _Firebird_s, see if you can pick one of the ones that's mounting twin PPCs and twin pulse lasers."

They came in again, still a single mass instead of a more complicated enveloping maneuver. Hans wasn't sure why they had chosen the formation they had but it couldn't possibly because their commander thought they couldn't handle it. Again each fighter seemed to pick its own target rather than concentrate fire on just a few 'mechs.

They did come in higher and faster than they had in the previous run, allowing each of his mechs only one shot instead of the two full exchanges they had managed previously. It was still a stupid attack profile, but marginally less stupid than before, and Hans allowed himself a grim smile as the results were tallied.

Zorro's _Prowler _had taken a laser dead center just before a second had slammed into the same spot on Hans' mech. Annie's left weapon pod took a hit but the armor held, and Alan Folz, _Heavy_-One-Two, nearly had a leg taken off by a heavy shell that hit the ground and exploded scant meters from his left leg. Others had lost armor, and Folz reported that at least one piece of shrapnel from the shell had gotten caught between two armor plates and had reduced mobility in his _Crab_'s left knee actuator by thirty percent.

Light damage, all things considered.

Two hits from those heavy-duty laser cannons the woofies had armed their fighters with would have been more than enough to overwhelm the armoring schemes of most of the mechs in _Backstop_.

Annie had accounted for the undamaged _Flatbed_. Its wings heavily damaged it had lumbered through the air, providing easy shots for the _sparrow-hawk_ missile packs. Packhurst hadn't managed to kill the damage one though, and while my group's fire had pounded our selected _Firebird_, it had flown on without any apparent regard for damage it had taken.

All in all, the results were less than satisfactory.

* * *

A/N: the scene with Laura is why MechWarriors of most national armies and professional mercenary companies are not allowed to consume alcohol twelve hours before climbing into their machines, and why getting a few beers into the game master can occasionally be really cool. He allowed it as a desperation move and a really unbelievable string of dice throws later…

Names have been changed to protect player's identities. Mechs and fighters have been changed for continuity reasons.


	24. Chapter 21

**Chapter 21**

_Bun Bun_'s avatar stared at me with an unblinking red eye. Fur and flesh had been burned away, revealing a shiny metal cranium, shoulder, and right arm. Fur covered the other side of its head, though the ear had been copped off halfway. Bits of metal gleamed from other wounds, and the damn thing had begun using that disturbing Austrian accent again. It had taken me years to hunt down the ancient references that had been used by the DI's programmers. What I had discovered about modeling the avatar the DI used when battle damage began to mount up to critical levels was not at all encouraging.

The avatar reflected the shape of _Bun Bun_ the mech. Armor had been blasted away, down to the framing members in some spots, the whole right arm laid bare to the laser mounts. But my weapons were still functional, the targeting computer was still operational, the autocannon still had nearly a third of a magazine left even after the long bursts sent in the direction of the fighters.

I really wanted to know how they had gotten past Merlin, he should have shut down the spaceport to make any kind of flight impossible, but that question could wait. Fortunately Goose Killer's little diversion seemed to have worked. Certainly the MetalStorm cannons used by the _Riflemans_ had to have come as an unpleasant surprise.

Viki's batteries had been ravaged. _Dragon_ was down to six effectives, half with damage. _Heavy_ had seven, but four of them were damaged as well. I'd lost one engineer dead, a second with a disabled mech that had lost a leg. Zorro had never made it back and a drone confirmed that his mech was a smear on a section of burned-out prairie. _Mustang_ only had eight percent losses, but those losses included my air defense section, and two-thirds of those left had combat damage, most of it severe.

So far I'd managed to come out ahead, but only because whoever was in charge on the other side had sent his mechs in piecemeal instead of concentrated. Even with the weight advantage most of my units carried into a fight, it wouldn't have been enough if they had hit us concentrated. If they had waited until we were in range, then hit us with the artillery and air strikes _and_ the mechs all at once… As it was, depending on what they had left guarded the spaceport other than those artillery mechs, I might not have enough left to win.

That would be bad for me, but worse for the Regiment. The Colonel had gotten roped into Marshal Steiner's defensive plan.

They'd fallen back on the agriplex factories in a series of rolling ambushes that the Brave Rifles had handles well enough. Steiner's final defensive strategy, however, had always been to fall back on the cities where the woofies' superior speed and weapons capability would be reduced. To be fair, it did just that, but it also denied the _Hexapumas_ and _Direcats_ their best advantage and compromised the artillery units.

Oh, the ground squadrons still packed a potent weapons mix, and it was easy enough to push up rubble to allow them to hull-down. However, without the ability to easily break contact by going mobile it had devolved into a stand-up fight in an urban area that the 3d Cav just wasn't designed for.

"They have stopped firing," Ivania Chomskya, _Mustang_-Three-One, observed.

"We've gotten into the blast-shadow of the warehouses," Tammy replied.

This close to the buildings the Arrow missiles would hit a building during their attack dive, rather than hit us. There were large roads between each of the mammoth warehouses. Each was clearly intended for multiple extra-large loader-mechs or other cargo-handling machines running abreast each other. We were probably covered if we cross the street, but sooner or later those arty mechs would maneuver onto the roads and be able to take us under enfilading fire.

A crow appeared on the tactical map.

"Welcome back, Merlin. What happened with those fighters?"

"They rigged launch cradles inside the droppers. When they couldn't take off they pulled the cradles and stuck them on the ground, then pulled the rear-mounted weapons for rocket packs."

_Bun Bun_ flashed a warning a moment before contact icons started to appear. A holo of the north side of the spaceport done in miniature hung before me. In the space of three heartbeats two recon drones were destroyed and a third blinded. A thick cloud of smoke filled the road between the second and third line of warehouses south of my position. The remaining drones reported heat and magnetic sources at the same time as contact icons for seismic activity flooded the area.

"There is one more thing," Merlin said.

"George, watch those contacts. Go ahead."

"They use hydrogen for reactor mass."

"Okay, so what?" I asked. We used Helium-Three, but we had an advantage no one else did.

"So they've got all of their aerodynes in hangers," Merlin said. "The command protocols for the automatic maintenance bays are several centuries out of date. The fueling umbilicals are force-fed high-pressure units."

"Yes, yes, they're designed to rebunker a dropper in a couple of hours," I said.

"Star League standard was four hundred tons in twelve hours," Merlin said. "Planting has a rapid turn-around port. It just doesn't take all that long to load some stuff so the more expensive gear made economic sense, and unlike a lot of tech the pumps and transfer equipment are in good order. They can deliver five hundred tons of hydrogen slush in six. I can put a little over twenty kilos of hydrogen slush per second into any one of those hangers the moment you give the order."

"What about the emergency shutdown?" I asked.

"Bypassed. Along with emergency cut-offs, ventilation, and cut outs. And, since their communication is currently through land-lines, I can shut down their comms."

"Civilians in the area?"

"Only those they brought with them."

I thought for a moment. The original plan had been to use LRMs and Arrow missiles armed with thermobaric warheads under the control of the Cyber-Warfare mechs to form explosively-formed penetrators of compressed air. Basically a very large shaped charge. It probably wouldn't be enough to destroy a dropper, but it would be more than enough to keep them from lifting until the damage was repaired. If there was a chance we could also launch missiles into the vessels through open cargo or 'mech doors, which would cause massive internal damage which, unlike the first plan, _could_ destroy a ship. The problem was that for the second to work, a door had to be open and we had to be close enough to launch missiles. And the first had always counted on having two of the cyber warfare mechs available. According to the modeling, one should be sufficient, _but_…

It was a very big 'but'. What Merlin was suggesting wouldn't be quite as good, but it may well be good enough. _If_ we could convince them that what happened to the hangers could be done to the ships outside of them.

"Do you have a list of what ships are in which hangers?"

On cue, five hanger buildings along the main runway began to flash.

"Link in _White Witch_."

"Orders, Major?" Viki asked.

"I'm going to call in and give them a chance to surrender," I said. "If they don't, Viki you'll launch on the following targets." I flipped her the tac-map with my targeting queue of the hangers. "We destroy them one at a time. Merlin, twenty seconds before impact you'll work your magic. Will the shock damage disrupt the umbilicals in the other hangers?"

"Possibly," he said. "If that happens I'll have to let the emergency overrides kick in and the other hangers will have to be destroyed the old-fashioned way."

"Understood. Five minutes from my mark. _Bun Bun_—"

"Communications are open," it grunted.

"Attention Clan Wolf Forces, located in and around the Foshinur StarPort," I said. "I have no desire to fight you inside a starport and cause additional needless damage to valuable facilities, so I offer you a choice. You may either board your vessels and leave the planetary surface and be considered _hors de combat._ Or, you may surrender yourselves to Task Force _Dagger_.

"Refusal to communicate will be interpreted as a desire to continue hostilities. You have five minutes in which to make your decision. If you do not, I will have no choice but to conclude that you wish to continue fighting at which point I will engage and destroy your DropShips. Your five minutes begins now."

I cut the channel.

"You don't really think they're going to go for it…do you, Boss?" Charles Martin, who had taken over command of _Mustang_'s support lance ever since Dietrich had gone off the air, asked.

"Probably not," I said. "We'll probably have to destroy a few droppers first, if it works at all. If any of you still have MSPs, dropped them now, you're going to need full mobility among these buildings. Scatter them about, if they come this way I want to give them a warm greeting. _Dragon_, Jeff, take your people around east, Eugene, offset _Heavy_ to the west. When we advance you'll run ahead of us. On contact we shift to plan Buford."

* * *

Latharn scowled at the com-panel in his OmniMech.

He wanted to order the fighters back in, but no, they had destroyed the enemy artillery force despite the unpleasant surprise that at least some of them carried an Arrow-launcher-compatible air-defense missile, they had destroyed a composite air-defense force, they had certainly softened the remaining BattleMechs. But they had only softened them. To send the fighters back in, with the severe levels of combat damage they had taken, would be to suffer complete losses for very little gain.

He had more fighters on the ground, but readying them for launch was taking much too long. They certainly would not be ready, not in sufficient numbers, before it would be too late to launch them. Even the valiant effort by the technicians and laborers would not be enough to enable the surviving pilots to change the course of this battle.

Perhaps if the scientists and technicians were to discover how the DropShips had been locked down into the landing and service cradles…but that was as likely as a worthwhile number of fighters being ready to put up into the air.

"Dorrell," he said, calling up his second point. "Were you able to DF them?"

"Neg. They used a repeater and broadcasted from a drone. Does it matter? We have them on seismic sensors."

"Aff, and they paused as soon as they saw our little deception, but you believe no more than I do that they have been taken in by it," Latharn said. "Just as you know as well as I that analysis of their machines has determined that none is fitted with an artillery system."

"It is possible that one of the _Longbows_—"

"Aff," Latharn said angrily, "if they carried almost no ammunition for their launchers, which is obviously not the case."

"Yes, Star Captain," Dorrell said.

"It is evident that they are not carrying artillery systems. Could one of the drones they deployed be carrying a warhead of sufficient force?"

"A nuclear weapon is feasible," Dorrell said after a moment, "but radiation sensors are clean for atomics. No other weapon of that size would do more than cosmetic damage, unless it was launched from orbit. So their threat is pointless."

Latharn quirked an eyebrow at the warrior in the com-display. "Do you seriously believe that, Warrior Dorrell, _quineg_?"

"Neg," Dorrell said after a moment. "I do not know how they would affect this, but I do not believe they would lie about having such a capacity. Orders?"

Latharn switched to a binary-wide push. "Alpha star will advance. Each point in Alpha will establish a link with the corresponding point in Bravo star. Bravo star will set their launchers for very high-ballistic, short-distance flight arcs to minimize the blind-zone from the warehouses. Teery, disperse your star. I do not believe they have artillery support left, but you would feel very foolish if you lost your first star to a single artillery round. Do not be stingy with your ammo. If someone calls in a strike, hit the target hard.

"Alpha, extended line, Alpha-One has center. Use your weapons, but our primary mission is to spot for Bravo. If possible get your Bravo counterpart to launch his missile before you pop out and designate a target. The missiles and new designators can handle it, but remember that they are prototypes and relatively fragile."

* * *

Latharn squeezed the firing circuit as a small machine dropped out of the air in front of him. _Griffin_, he told himself, identifying the medium-weight BattleMech before the warbook program could. The energy weapons mounted in the right arm of his _Gargoyle_ dug into a leg, and for a moment he thought that the damage was purely cosmetic.

The enemy machine turned to face him and on its second step the right leg shattered above the knee actuator. The BattleMech tottered precariously for a moment before falling onto its back. As it toppled, energy weapons flashed out. Two lasers and what appeared to be a lightweight low-powered PPC washed over his frontal armor doing minimal damage even as more energy weapons struck the building next to him. Missiles exploded out of a pair of 6-rack launchers, peppering his armor with pock-holes.

Latharn drifted the targeting carats down and his follow-up strike destroyed the cockpit and the warrior inside of it.

* * *

A light code indicating an enemy mech appeared in the tactical plot. A side-code identified its base-chassis as one of the eighty-ton monster I had fought before. A moment later Olivia Kuzac's, _Dragon_-Two-Four, _Griffin_ had its leg sheathed in the broken red and white stripes of crippling damage. AVIX dutifully reported the hits she got in that did little more than cosmetic damage, and an analysis of the mech's weapons array, before she went off-line. One of the few surviving recon drones broadcasted the imagery of the 'mech pouring laser-fire into her cockpit.

Both _Dragon_ and _Heavy_ were reporting contacts with yet another new model of 'mech. This one an armless thing with missile pods, like my _Longbows_. Unlike the _Longbows_ these carried paired Arrow IV launchers, long-range lasers, and a target designator.

A buzzer blared its warning and I hit my jets and boosted right out of someone's sights because laser-fire flashed beneath me. "Arthur, take your lance right. Invania, yours goes left." No sooner had I gotten this out than I had to cut in my jets again and landed _Bun Bun_ neatly on the roof of the warehouse.

It creaked and moaned and I got _Bun Bun_ moving. It struck me as odd the first time I heard it, but a moving mass actually exerts less force on an object than one standing still. Thus, while my 'mech weighed more than enough to compromise the integrity of the roof, by keeping it moving I was able to keep the warehouse from collapsing underneath me, if only just.

"Charles, move the support lance forward as fast as you can and stand by for calls for fire."

I hit the jets again, crossing the road as I drove south, a trio of mechs following after me.

"Dammit, Boss, slow down!" Tammy grunted over the comm.

"Move faster, Tams," I snapped back as another one of _Dragon_-two's mechs went black. _Bun Bun_ tagged a locator beacon, so the lance's sergeant had made it out, but than _Dragon-_two-one simply exploded.

A glance at the timer as I crossed another street said forty seconds left on the clock. Another street, this one crowded with flares and smoke generators. From somewhere in the mess of sensor returns came a flight of missiles, but most went wide and point-defense got most of the rest. _Bun Bun_ took a couple hits, then a pair of more serious hits from a set of lasers. One cored the armor over the right hip almost all the way to the actuator, while the other burned through the remaining armor over the autocannon and shattered one of the framing members that formed my mech's ribs.

"Remote weapons turrets," I noted.

The DI analyzed the hits, flagged it, and sent the contact back through AVIX to the others even before I muttered an identification of what had hit me.

I hit the jets as soon as I touched down again, and the jets, without enough time to cool, brought me down in the middle of the next street.

"Lance, rally."

A rally beacon for _Mustang_-one went up on the tactical plot, and a moment later an Arrow artillery missile came screaming down from straight up.

I spotted it, but the point-defense cluster was on _Bun Bun_'s left shoulder and faced forward and the missile came down behind me and to the right. Fortunately it wasn't a direct hit, but the remaining armor on my back was shattered, and the right elbow stiffened from actuator damage.

I snapped out a warning of missile-arty on high ballistic-flight paths, when the 'mech that killed Olivia stepped out of the (relatively) small alley that ran between two warehouses.

* * *

The timer counted down the last seconds and Viktoriya smiled coldly. "Fire!"

The _Padilla_ shuddered as a solitary missile was launched, and a corner of her mind was focused on the still-circling fighters. It was unlikely that they would or even could effectively engage her artillery tracks again, but only a fool would ignore them. If nothing else they could spot fire for the artillery 'mechs guarding the starport.

A single Arrow IV missile leapt into the sky, then angled sharply upward. With the distance of the launching track, its current flight profile, it would take thirty seconds to reach the first of the five designated hangers.

* * *

The first surveyors to the Planting system had first noticed the system primary, a relatively ordinary G3V main-sequence star that was only slightly (as far as such things go) hotter than Sol. This had been followed by the realization that the system's sole habitable planet traced an orbit almost precisely on the dotted line through the middle of the so-called 'Goldilocks Zone'. A minimal axial tilt reduced the weather patterns to a single season and minimal weather.

Broad, open continents had a minimum of tectonic activity. The soil quality was excellent. There was potable water in quantity. The system had excellent positioning in relationship to the surrounding systems. And unlike on other planets there were no native diseases that found Terran crops particularly susceptible or micro-organisms that found Terran chlorophyll to be particularly tasty.

The only real problem was in getting water to the crops. The mild weather produced relatively little rain, and the local aquaspheres tended to be very small (on a global scale). There were a few very large lake complexes, the Great Lakes of Old Terra at their historical highs would have fit comfortably into the smallest lake in one particular six-lake complex. But that was the exception, not the rule. Old Terra had nearly two _hundred_ rivers that were in excess of a thousand kilometers from source to drainage, but the planet that would become known as Planting had barely a third that number.

The original settlers had been a long-minded sort, and land had been set aside near the mouth of the world's largest river—to take advantage of the inherent efficiency of water transport—for what would, centuries later, become of Foshinur StarPort Complex.

The Aerodyne Complex featured, instead of the normal solitary double-strip main runway, two paired sets, allowing two simultaneous take-offs and landings and near enough to the equator to make maximum use of the planet's rotation to help slow or propel a DropShip as required. Situated between these were the Aerodyne Control Facility, the Foshinur StarPort Air-Management Facility, the Main Emergency Response Center, and all the other necessary management facilities. North of the runways were a long row of hangers and maintenance facilities, followed by cargo-handling centers, and then warehouses.

To the south of the Aerodyne Complex was the Spheroid Space Complex. Unlike the AC which also handled sub-orbital traffic that brought in cargos from land-locked interiors, or that had time-critical processing requirements, the SSC was devoted entirely to servicing ground-to-orbit traffic. It was laid out in a half-circle of four pie-slice-shaped sectors under control of the Spheroid Space Control Facility. Each sector had its own fire-and crash crews, its own maintenance and cargo-loading facilities. In theory each sector could handle up to fifteen DropShips landing or taking off, plus ships waiting on pads. In addition, forming the 'crust' were a hangers, seven to a sector and each capable of holding and servicing three _Mule_-class DropShips, transported to and from hangers by mammoth crawlers.

To the East of the Foshinur Space Comples was cargo handling from the Tri-Cities AgriPlex factories, and beyond that, Dantron Meander, including the river docks for the foodstuffs transported by watercraft from around the world. To the West was the hydrogen tank-farm that not only produced hydrogen slush for refueling DropShips and ground-to-orbit shuttles, but also for fueling the reactors of the port and the most of the Dantron-Sontor-Belex tri-cities.

For security and in interest of disrupting civilian castes who were doing their jobs—and, as far as Clan Wolf was concerned, could go right on doing them provided they didn't make trouble—the Wolves had taxied their aerodyne DropShips so the Spheroid Space Complex where they had claimed total control of Sector One and Sector Two. Willing to let the civilian laborers continue their jobs, the Wolves were, trusting and stupid they were not.

Also for security they had stored one aerodyne per hanger with an empty hanger between each occupied one, while their spheroid DropShips were left in their landing/launch cradles.

In SCC Hanger-One-Two, the second hanger in section one, was the _Leopard_-class DropShip _Castle_, the first of two such vessels assigned to support the 341st Assault Cluster. Across the hanger, three fueling hatches snapped open, exposing the nozzle-like ends of refueling umbilicals.

One tech, attracted by the noise, paused to look and died instantly as more than twenty kilos of hydrogen slush slammed into him with sufficient force to crush the life out of him. His companion was not so lucky, as the hydrogen, normally cooled to less than twenty-five Kelvins, splashed over her. Even as it boiled and sublimated, it did not do so fast enough. Fortunately the pumps continued to pump still more into the completely sealed hanger so her death was at least mercifully fast.

The other pumps—each hanger had three parking/service bays though only on rare occasions were there dropships small enough for all to be in use at the same time—had activated at the same time, and nearly sixty-nine and a half kilos of slush hydrogen poured into the hanger. Before Viktoriya's missile reached the hanger, almost one and a fifth _tons_ of hydrogen slush had been poured into the hanger. That slush had mostly dispersed into hydrogen's gaseous form, and, incidentally, rapidly dropped the temperature in the hanger.

_Castle_'s compute had noticed the change in atmosphere, correctly interpreted as a port-based hydrogen leak, and automatically slammed shut all of its ports in an attempt to keep any crew on board from asphyxiating or dying should a spark cause a dockside fire. Those trapped outside of the vessel but inside the hanger were dead long before the missile arrived. Those trapped inside the DropShip tried in vain to contact the outside, but their communications were tied into the Spheroid Space Complex's communications to avoid cluttering the radio bands or having their transmissions intercepted, and Merlin had hacked into their communication protocols.

Then the missile struck, tearing a hole in the roof of the hanger. That a spark did not instantly ignite the hydrogen could be better describe as an Act of your Deity-of-choice than pure luck. The warhead noted the impact. The explosive compound it released into the hanger had no more oxidizer in it than the hydrogen did, that was what the hanger's atmosphere was for after all, but it was a great many times more powerful.

At the same time it registered the hit, a trio of submunitions broke free from the warhead. Tiny propellers spun as they plummeted towards the ground, slowing them fractionally to give the explosive time to disperse throughout the hanger.

They exploded long before they hit the ground.

* * *

I was in mid-hop when a flash of light lit up the south. A massive column of fire shot up into the sky a moment before a blast-front slammed into me and nearly tumbled the gyros. I landed hard and warnings of stress-fractures sheathed _Bun Bun_'s legs. Everything else looked good, however.

I reached out and a hand-motion flipped the image around and zoomed in on the southern portion of the space-port. The explosion had ripped away the roof of the hanger and blasted out the main doors. A broad streak punctuated by still-burning objects decorated the taxiway leading to the hanger doors. Inside the pit of the building was a roaring inferno, but lacked the characteristic blue-colored flame of a pure-hydrogen fire. Apparently something else was doing the burning because by now the safeties should have cut off the flow of hydrogen to that building.

The hangers to either side looked remarkably intact. Apparently whoever had designed the hangers had taken a fuel explosion into the design and built the things to channel the explosion up and away from the hangers to either side. The hanger door was a structural weak point, or perhaps it had been replaced over the past centuries and, like so much other stuff it seemed, not replaced by a component that was up to spec.

It didn't matter. What mattered was pressing ahead while they were still unsettled before the next explosion. In one corner a timer began to count down from one minute.

* * *

Latharn was barely rocked by an unexpected explosion.

"Report!" he snapped on the open channel.

"Hanger-one-two exploded, Star Captain!" a wide-eyed technician replied.

"Your name!"

"Technician Bern, Star Captain," the tech replied. "There was a large explosion. The door of the hanger was ripped off. The roof was likewise blasted off. It appears as though the hangers were constructed to vent accidental hydrogen-fuel explosions upwards so the hangers to either side were spared destruction."

"Casualties?"

"U-unknown, sir," the tech said. "The DropShip _Castle_ is not responding. It was hangered inside and fires are still raging. It will be some time before—"

"It is dead," Latharn said coldly, cutting the technician off. "What are our other losses?"

"We are still gathering that information, Star Captain," the tech replied. "A piece of falling debris took out the Sector One Control Complex, I have duty in the Sector Two Control Complex, but we have lost the Sector One information exchange. There was a large secondary explosion in Sector One, perhaps an ammunition handling party."

Latharn started to reply when a _Marauder_ stepped out from between two buildings. It carried an autocannon in one side torso bay instead of the usual mount on its back. A fairly effective prairie-scheme camouflage was painted over it, except for two bands of Black Watch tartan around one upper arm and one upper leg. A section of lower-leg armor was taken up by a two meter-tall mini-lop rabbit carrying an open switchblade.

Twin PPCs reached out for him and he took one hit dead center, but Latharn recovered quickly and charged, leading with his laser-equipped right arm.

The enemy backed, trying to keep the range open where his PPCs would have the advantage, but Latharn was letting him have none of it. The _Marauder_ backed into a warehouse was stopped as Latharn crossed into laser range and all of the energy mounts in his right arm array blazed and went home in the BattleMech's lower torso.

Its jump jets flared and Latharn spun his mech aside as the 75-ton machine burned past close enough to leave singe marks on the ceramcrete.

Latharn expected the machine to go up and over a warehouse, to put something physical between them, but it failed to do so. Either its pilot had other ideas, or it had taken battle damage that prevented the movement.

No matter. He would soon finish this fight, and then he would destroy whoever had attacked the destroyed hanger.

* * *

"Coolant leak, left arm. Coolant leak, left arm."

Even the Austrian accent was gone now, replaced by a flat mechanical voice that. Not a good sign.

"Left arm removed from coolant loop."

Definitely not a good sign. Removing the arm from the coolant loop preserved the remaining coolant, but without the cooling system to cool the weapon mount… "Remove the left arm myomers from the heat-control loop. Link the left particle cannon and laser directly into the myomers. Status of number-two right jet."

"Number-two right jet, non-functional."

"Specify."

"Number-two right jet, micro-fractures detected in plenum chamber."

Which meant that, yes, I could over-ride and use it, but if the micro-fractures gave way, or even developed into a full crack, I'd might as well drop the magnetic containment field on _Bun Bun_'s fusion core because I'd be venting fusion plasma directly into my mech's innards.

The targeting cues hovering around the enemy mech crackled and fritzed and were an eyeblink slow in updating with every movement we made.

"Unspecified fault, targeting computer. Unspecified fault, targeting computer."

I had already figured that out, but I managed to hit him with my right PPC, catching the 'mech right around the neck, but I reserved firing my right, and rattled off a few more rounds of AC ammo just to keep him guessing.

"Cut the targeting computer out of the loop."

The targeting cues had lost their fine edge, but in a one-on-one duel at this range I didn't really need them and the cues did stop jumping and cleaned up some so it was a net gain.

"Restrict to number-one jets."

"Use of number-two jets…now restricted."

Jumping with unbalanced jets was never a good idea, but I over-rode and leapt over the machine as it tried to get in close. I may have flash-burned it a little, but it gave me time to back off again.

Not far enough and now it revealed what it held in its left arm. A rapid-fire heavy autocannon, at least a dash-10 model, maybe even a twenty. One hit went home in the guts of the targeting computer which at least would save me from worrying about _that_ particular piece of classified equipment falling into enemy hands. A second hit found the primary autocannon magazine.

The cellular ammo storage worked only partially. One hatch failed to blast open, possibly fused shut from a laser hit, or perhaps blocked by a piece of debris or shattered armor or framing member. It didn't matter. One side of my _Marauder_'s torso was bathed in crimson.

The magazine blew out, and it took the reversible hip-laser, the autocannon, and the laser point-defense system with it. The fusion core's magnetic containment field flickered, but then steadied down. The torso wasn't a complete loss, but only barely. The shoulder actuator remained structurally sound, and the autocannon had absorbed enough of the damage from the exploding magazine to protect the engine.

"Dump the secondary magazine." Without a weapon to use it, the ammunition was trouble waiting to happen.

"Dumping… Secondary magazine, dumped."

I was down to just _Bun Bun_'s arm-mounted weapons, and half of those had heat trouble.

I could see the other mech settling down, the left arm coming up for a _coup de grace_. A move for when you were in a big fight and wanted to put an enemy down hard without wasting any ammo more than was absolutely necessary because you might need the rest. Well fuck that.

The range was less than a hundred fifty meters. That was barely twenty percent the range that my particle cannons were designed for, and even for my medium lasers that was middling range.

I hurt him. I hurt him bad and I knew it. Armor exploded in twisted shards and he staggered back

That did not keep my left PPC from hitting the ground as the heat-bloom caused the structural members holding it on to literally melt.

I had overheat warning on half a dozen systems, stress warning on more. Most of my sensors were out. AVIX was down, and with the lack of input from sensors and AVIX, ARES abilities were vastly reduced.

"Remove field inhibitors and safety interlocks from right PPC."

"Field inhibitors…disengaged. Safety interlocks…off."

There was a flicker and _Bun Bun_'s avatar appeared on the communications screen as the holographic interface finally gave up the ghost. "Boss, you have serious problems."

"Tell me something I don't know."

Pause.

"There is an enemy mech right behind you."

I blinked, started to turn. Then twin sledgehammers wielded by an angry god slammed into my back. One went home in the gyro. I was so violently ill I never even felt the second hit, but somehow I managed to keep _Bun Bun_ on its feet. ARES was down completely, the holographic interface was off. Thing grayish smoke made everything hazy and there was an acrid smell of burning plastic. Damage codes cascaded by too quickly for me to read. Something about a knee and a shoulder. I did recognize that I had a _major_ coolant-loss casualty and one of the hits had taken out the heat-management computer.

"Cut feeds to the reactor."

_Bun Bun_ didn't reply.

I reached out for the emergency engine shut down and ended up sticking my hand in a mess of wires and circuitry.

All I had to do was take one look at the engine status panel to know that I was about to have a ring-side seat for the catastrophic failure of a fusion plant.

Then the straps jerked me back in the seat. I braced myself with the instincts that come from drilling something ten or twenty thousand times.

"Sorry, Boss."

Then things got very bright and very loud.

* * *

Latharn grunted as the _Marauder_'s head exploded and a command couch rocketed out of it. He started to open a channel to Dorrell, then reconsidered and left it closed. There would be time enough later to discuss the Warrior's actions later, when they won. And if he were to die first, well, there would be additional glory to gain before that happened.

He grimaced at the sticky sensation of moving with the locked right knee. It did terrible things for his top speed and maneuverability, but somehow the enemy warrior had managed to put a PPC bolt into it before he ejected. Locking it down was his only real choice, lest he sheer the actuator and lose the entire leg.

He did, however, sending the few seconds from his bat-roms to the StarPort for archival. A warrior, even a freebirth one, who was capable of keeping a BattleMech upright after taking a pair of direct hits from an Ultra AC/20 in the front, and a pair of direct hits by Arrow IV missiles in the back, let alone get in a final hit in reply, was worth noting.

The world outside his cockpit turned white.

* * *

_It wasn't a total critical failure_, was my first thought as I drifted back down. If it had been there was no way in any hell anyone had ever believed in that I could have lived. Either the magnetic confinement field had held longer than projected, or the hydrogen feeds had been cut. I could remember seeing that the automatics that were supposed to stop pumping reactor mass into the fusion core had failed, and the shutdown controls had been a blasted ruin, which left what…

Ejecting the hydrogen fuel tanks?

That wasn't normally possibly. They were placed deeply and covered by as much armor as they possibly could. They had to be, lest a lucky hit cause an internal explosion and, worse, deprive a mech of fuel. But _Bun Bun_'s guts had been blasted wide open. Maybe some kind of short or feed-back…

I hit the ground, or rather the roof of an warehouse, and began to painfully extricate myself from my chute.

My command couch had detached itself automatically and had plummeted away, but fortunately was on the roof with me. I tore open the back and found an emergency field pack, and a rifle. The ARES-capable neurohelmet was part of a distributed system. Sensors in the suit ran down my spine helped ease its workload so there was enough room (and mass) savings in it to provide almost as much protection as the ground troops got. It was also capable, in an emergency, of generating a secondary ARES environment if the cockpit primary was lost.

Mostly this was a pointless feature since any hit that took out the cockpit system probably took out the mech-jock with it. However, ARES and AVIX were designed to be cross-compatible, and I had made a point of having a full infantry kit stowed in _Bun Bun_'s cockpit. If there had been time to manually bail out I would have had access to an infantry-grade sensor pack and AVIX link.

Still, I had the helmet internals which weren't great but better than nothing. I also has the most deadly weapon ever given to an infantryman.

I had a radio.

"This is Major Talbot, I ejected safely. George, take charge."

There was a massive explosion to the south. I turned and threw myself down, pressing my hands to my ears, opening my mouth, and squeezing my eyes shut before the blast-wave rolled over me.

* * *

Latharn watched another mech die, pounded to death by artillery rockets, and felt a moment of satisfaction. It was not _Zellbrigen_, it was not the Honor Road, but he was going to win. He had lost only two _Naga_s, and the rest of his Alpha star all had damage, but he was going to win and that would make it all—

There was a large explosion to the south.

He paused his advance, letting Dorrell take lead as he checked out the new development. What he saw made him blanch.

Hanger One-Four had just blown up, taking the _Titan_-class DropShip _Demon Cage_ with it.

"Counter-battery those launchers!"

"We can't, Star Captain!"

"What does that mean?" Latharn Fetladral snarled.

"The initial bombardment took out the StarPort's radars," Teery said, the moment's pause enough to steady him. "The missiles are coming from the swamp-forest to the south. We are detecting hundreds of targets in there, likely radar-reflectors. The canopy is too thick for thermal sensors. I can use the fighters as spotters, but to deliver the concentrated damage necessary would take the entire star."

Latharn stared unseeing as another enemy BattleMech, this one a _Flashman_, rounded the corner. His _Gargoyle_ had been badly hurt in the explosion but remained combat capable, only…what was the point?

He had fought honorably and well. He had in his power the ability to defeat the force of BattleMechs trying to challenge him. Half of the BattleMechs that had reached the line of warehouses were dead or disabled already. But without a way of destroying those launchers, which he could not do as long as the BattleMech force remained to divide his attention, the DropShips he was supposed to protect would be destroyed.

"Cease fire, break contact," He said. Continuing to resist would only get the DropShips destroyed, or would get his binary destroyed and _then_ the DropShips destroyed. Latharn flipped to open broadcast. "I, Latharn Fetlardral, Star Captain of Artillery Binary, Silver Keshik, Beta Galaxy of Clan Wolf, will hear your terms."

The _Flashman_ that had been staring him down paused.

"Star Captain Fetlardral," spoke a voice that was different from the one that had issued the ultimatum. "You can either surrender Foshinur StarPort Complex, including all of your troops, DropShips, supplies, and any other material or personnel in or around the Complex. Or, if you wish, you may embark your personnel, along with their personal gear and small arms, but not any heavy combat equipment, and return to your fleet. Crews for your aerodyne vessels will board and secure their vessels, and remain there until conditions are such that they too can return to your fleet. In accepting this, your troops are _hors de combat_, Star Captain. Any attempt by any vessel to return to planetary surface, or to take onboard personnel or any heavy combat equipment, will be considered a violation of terms."

There was a long pause.

"I suppose, since you will have to recover those fighters somehow, that they can land on your DropShips under the same conditions. And since I'm going to allow you to have _them_, I suppose I can include any 'mechs that are currently being piloted, to be included in your list of evacuatable gear."

Latharn did not reply immediately.

"My orders are to deny space-lift capacity to your main force. If you do that by surrendering your DropShips or leaving with them, or I destroy them, it makes no difference to me, Star Captain."


	25. Chapter 22

**Chapter 22**

I woke up in a sickbay. It wasn't a full-up IC suite, but it was better than anything most droppers had to offer. Fortunately most of the gear was stowed, though I could feel the banding of micro-grav restraints. Several of the other beds were occupied, and a nurse was moving among them. Standing out from all of this was a very familiar figure in orange.

"Hey, Muriko," I said.

She frowned at me, but then, I doubted she'd ever be as comfortably informal as I was.

"_Chu-sa_ Kurita no Takamori Muriko, greetings," I said.

"And now you are teasing me," she said. She held up a hand, clearly uncomfortable. "I am sorry. I came to, among other things, express my condolences. Mary was a…beautiful woman."

That was a surprise. Even for a Drac, and Muriko was about as Drac as they came, she was reserved. Also, she hadn't liked Mary at all, but that didn't make what she said any less heartfelt.

"Thank you," I said. "Where am I?"

"The number-two sickbay on the _Hood_," she said. "The doctors thought a familiar face might be welcome when you awoke. You were struck in the head by a piece of debris from the second hanger and dropship you destroyed."

Which brought up my second question, "Did we win?"

"_Hai_," she said, much more relaxed as I turned the conversation to more comfortable ground. "With their transports denied, and not allowed to land any more troops without the planetary government's specific removal, saKhan Garth Raddick had little choice. He could continue to fight, at least so long as his ammunition and machines lasted out, but unable to replenish his losses it was only a matter of time until the Commonwealth was able to bring sufficient forces into the system to destroy his forces. He was most put out that the supplies already off-loaded were taken as, to use his term, _issorla_, and therefore did not count against his wager…ransom?" she paused, then shrugged it off. "The techs are already drooling over the captured gear."

"Losses?"

"Most of the supplementary forces attached to the Brave Rifles were destroyed," she reported. "The 3d Cavalry lost nearly seventy percent of the ground forces it started with, and nearly its entire air-squadron. _Dagger_ had nineteen killed and an additional seventeen mechs destroyed out of an initial strength of fifty-two mechs, and all of the rest have heavy damage. Several may end up being a total write-off."

"So now what?"

"So now the Clans will not invade Planting," she said. "Not ever. Their honor will not allow it. We have been ordered to Tamar, and have embarked what is left of the 41st Avalon Hussars and are bringing them with us. After that…" she shrugged uncomfortably.

"I will need to return to Luthien. The rest of my pe…the rest of the _Kuronami_ were declared Unproductive when we left our assigned duty posts and joined with you. All save I. I must return to Luthien and…cleanse my honor."

I gave her a long considering look. "_Seppuku_," I said.

She raised an eyebrow.

"Do you have something else in mind?" I asked. I remembered that historically there was another rite for woman, but I couldn't remember if the Combine used it or not. They didn't have more than a sparse handful of women in high-ranking leadership positions so I doubted the situation came up all that often.

"No," she said. "Will you act as _kaishakunin_ for me?"

So apparently _seppuku_ was the order of the day. "If that is what you wish of me, I will be honored, but I will require the permission of my superiors."

"Of course," she said, then hesitated.

"What else?" I asked.

"The Director-General sent me to get you."

"Grand," I managed. "Where's my uniform?"

* * *

The conference room was half-full when we got there. Amanda was sitting at the head of the table, next to her in his life-support frame was Victor, on Amanda's other side was Chris, her former tutor and now Chief of Staff. Setting down from Victor were Generals Winters and Carson, and Admiral Murakama, and that was it. There was a pair of Black Watch guards at the hatch, but no security presence inside the room. The Cap was slipping, or Amanda was being unusually obstinate.

"Paladin," she said brightly as soon as the hatch had cycled shut behind us.

"Don't call me that," I said automatically. I didn't expect it to work, it hadn't after any of the other times in the five or six years since she had read _the_ _Song of Roland_.

She smiled. It wasn't a happy one, but the kind that you usually see on vets long after they've come home from the wars. The one that comes from remembering friends in situations that were extremely…sub-optimal.

"You'll always be our Paladin, Roland," replied her brother.

"Hello to you too, Ian," I said lightly. Victor did not care at all for his first name and liked his second even less (which I don't think anyone blamed him for, under the circumstances). Normally I wouldn't have gone after him, but he had dealt himself into it.

Victor raised a hand slightly and Amanda smiled. "Okay, Roland, point taken, no need to tease my brother to get back at me. Sit down."

"You know, I've never understood why she calls you that," Christine McCay said as I sat.

I looked at her with some surprise. "You mean she's never told you, ma'am?"

She shook her head.

I shrugged. "I was the one who carried them out."

She frowned, "I thought Major MacIntosh—"

"Mighty Mac was in charge of the evacuation," I said, then shrugged again. "Amaris nuked most of the mech-hangers, and he used nerve gas on the infantry barracks and thermobarics on both of the morgues—"

"Morgues?"

"Battle armor storage," General Winters. "The best way of storing it for active use looks rather like the corpse-chests in morgues." He nodded for me to continue.

"But the Black Watch believed in distributed nets. If one part is taken out the others remain. The Fat Man didn't know about the supply drops, and GOTH caches, for example, and Colonel Hazen was able to utilize those effectively, at least the ones she knew about or was able to find out about. He didn't get all of the hangers. He got most of us before we could get to our equipment of course…"

I shook the memory away. "By the time we formed up the Colonel figured she needed the best teams to keep the Amaris Dragoons busy so she took all of the whole lances that had formed and then all of the stragglers as well. Normally the Black Watch had mech battalions of fifty, three companies of fourteen, plus two command lances so that the commander and XO were physically separated in case one of the command lances got hit. Major MacIntosh had three-quarters of his command lance available and I was the only one from my lance there so I got to carry the twins while the rest of his command lance screened me."

"Ahh," Christine said.

"I'm sorry about _Bun Bun_," Amanda said into the silence that had followed my explanation. "We both are," she said, lightly resting her hand on Victor's shoulder, "we know how attached you were."

I shrugged, but it hurt. It wasn't quite the same hurt as losing a friend. It was the hurt of losing something that you had entrusted your life to for years. I expected a Marine would feel something similar if his rifle were to be destroyed. And, hell, abrasive programmed smart-system and creativity of a dim dog aside, the DI had been…something.

"You wanted to see me, Director-General?" I asked bluntly.

She nodded, the suddenly intent, serious expression she bore didn't really have a place on any sixteen-year old's face. She and Victor had had to grow up fast. Fortunately both were better than Ricky had ever been, and seemed inclined to go right on growing up that way. "Thanks to Admiral Murakama we have managed to fill in some of the holes in our knowledge of what has happened since we…left."

"Such as?" I asked.

"You don't know?" she asked.

"I just got woken up and brought down here," I told her.

"Oh," she frowned. She looked down the table at Murakama. "Ariel, I think you can explain this better than I."

Murakama frowned slightly and I tried not to smile. There were certain ways that things were supposed to be done. Majors were not supposed to be called in to be given assignments directly by the Director-General, and navy-side Vice-Admirals do not brief army-side Majors. "While you were fighting on the planet, Major, I was able to strike up something of a rapport with my counterpart among the Clan Wolf fleet. She was…very reticent about their…social/civilian background, but was very open about their military posture. For example, it appears as though they have no military-intelligence capability, both sides are expected to provide comprehensive unit strengths."

"The invaders are not just Clan Wolf," Amanda said. "There are actually more than a dozen, all apparently named for predatory animals though most match no animal in the database."

"A colony mission that…left after we did," I said. "The SLDF? I think there was something about most of it packing up and leaving in the background brief that General Steiner gave us and the Colonel squealed up to us-_Dagger_, I mean."

"That would be the logical conclusion," McCay said. "They were the only recorded mass migration effort made after we jumped. Several of the Great Houses have sent out colony fleets, mostly small ventures. The current major governments are leaning towards the same conclusions, but they don't have some of our resources. It is unlikely that they realize that the WarShips are carrying SLDF transponders."

"Roland, there's no easy way to say this but…" Amanda took a deep breath. It was maybe the third time I'd ever seen her reticent about speaking her mind. Even as a toddler strapped into _Bun Bun_'s jumpseat in the mad run to the _Abyss_ she hadn't shut up. "We, that is, the Task Force, I think we _did_ jump to Earth as planned."

"But…" I feel silent.

"But we also ended up here, yes, I know," she said, "But according to Star Commodore Chi'in, Liz survived. I don't know about anyone else, myself and Victor likely did not, but Liz was actually at Kerensky' headquarters. She left with the SLDF, but I can't imagine her doing that if there was any chance we were alive…"

It felt like someone had thrust a hand under my ribs, grabbed my heart, and began to squeeze. Blood drained from my face and for a moment I couldn't breathe.

"Rollie?" Amanda asked.

I looked at her bleakly. I had never really liked Kerensky, not many in the Black Watch had. Too many of us had seen his waltzing around the galaxy as abandoning his responsibility as Regent, or, as in my case, had seen the results and wondered if he would have been better if the Old Man had been around. But would he destroy us all out of hand?

"Kerensky?" I asked.

Amanda took a deep breath as Murakama looked away. The majority of the people in the compartment were sworn to her and Victor's service one way or another. McCay as first their tutor, then their Chief of Staff and now, effectively, Foreign Secretary as well. People like Carson and myself were sworn to her as Director-General, either directly through the Terran Hegemony Cavalry as in the General's case, or through the Black Watch first like mine. Murakama was the only person in the compartment who was regular SLDF. Her oath of service saw the First Lord as its ultimate Commander in Chief, but Amanda wasn't the First Lord, would never _be_ First Lord until and unless the Star League was resurrected and the heads of the great houses confirmed her as First Lord.

"We don't know that," Amanda said.

"You think he did," I said flatly.

"I don't know, Roland. Jackson, the Nessies, the idea that I was my father and was just going to kick the whole thing off again, make it worse…" She gave a hollow, bitter laugh that hurt more than the idea that the General may have killed us. "He couldn't stand to be around me. Proof of his failures, I think. Or maybe he thought a sixteen year old, unconfirmed, Director-General was more hindrance to the peace process than an asset. Or that he knew if given the chance I'd force him to retire and he couldn't stand the idea of being brushed off into a honorable retirement even if it's what he and the damned Star League needed. Or he thought that I'd put the Terran Hegemony above his precious Star League. Or that I'd use the SLDF defend the Hegemony and let the rest hang. Or any one of hundreds of other obscene possibilities.

"The man was old, tired and planning on running away, but didn't think he could honorably disobey an order if I gave it to him. Not any more. So for whatever reason he blew all of us into _very_ small pieces—_may_ have blown us into small pieces, I mean…except for Liz."

She looked at me, and I could understand what she was thinking even if I couldn't explain it. Despite spending almost all of her life on a warship she hadn't turned out too badly. Part of that was because we—the few survivors of the Black Watch—had sought out the best tutors we could find, but somewhere along the way she'd adopted me as an unofficial big brother.

Or maybe I was just flattering myself.

Amanda was certainly the more approachable of the twins, the one with the better understanding of human relations. Both were intelligent, but Victor had a tendency to be as coldly analytical as the machines that kept him alive.

"I suppose there is a specific reason why my presence was requested?" I asked. It was rude and my tone made it ruder, but I was tired, some of my oldest friends were dead, and I had probably lost more among the regiment, not to mention the mech that had kept me alive for almost fifteen years.

"We have to keep up some kind of offensive," Amanda said. "We cannot afford to stop. We're effectively as much outsiders in the Inner Sphere as the Clans are, and our military capability is the only resource we have to gain goodwill with."

So we'd become Mercs. Wonderful. I kept the thought to myself.

"We've got a mission planned," she continued, "and I want you on it."

"I have to go to Luthien with Muriko," I told her. The generals were all wooden-faced. You just did not talk to your CO this way, but…the hell with it. It wasn't fair, it wasn't like anyone else could bank on a relationship with Amanda like mine, but at this point I didn't really care about fair.

Amanda nodded as though she had been expecting it. Who knows, if Muriko had forwarded it to General Jackson then it was quite possible that she had known to expect it. "A command circuit is being established between Tamar in the Federated Commonwealth to Luthien. Minimal transfer time. You'll be there in four days, maximum. A similar circuit will bring you back. You're authorized temporary leave for up to twelve days including transit time, from the time we jump into Tamar.

"General Winters, the mission brief, please."

Winters reached forward and touched a control that brought up a holo.

"We are going to conduct a series of deep raids, some targeting specific clans, others swinging back and forth along the boarders of each occupation zone. Our objective is to force them to slow the invasion to reinforce their current garrisons. If possible we will take advantage of their bidding practice to force them to either permanently relinquish certain strategic worlds, or to gain specific supplies and cause logistical shortages. The raid units will carry a large quantity of local war material for distribution to arm and equip insurgents and irregular forces."

I nodded slowly. It made a great deal of sense. If the whole Inner Sphere was mobilizing, of even if just this Federated Commonwealth was, given its size, then delaying would give them time to move additional forces to the front. It would also give us time to get the House Lords to work together. If that could be managed than maybe, just maybe, the armies of the House Lords could all be brought to bear on the invaders. That would be a brutal, attritional strategy, but as one Terran dictator had once observed, 'quantity has a quality all its own.'

"Who are you going to use?" I asked, already partially knowing the answer. Not the 3d, not with losses as severe as Muriko had intimated, at least not without some serious I&I followed by a great deal of rebuilding.

"There will be several raid teams," Carson said. "But the Jade Falcon OZ presents us with a unique opportunity. Elizabeth Hazen, the one that was left in the past, was part of Kerensky's 'Exodus'. According to some of the prisoners, she was one of the founding members of that Clan, its first leader in fact.

"She's going to be in charge, but has little practical experience in this kind of operation or commanding a force this large. You'll be her ground commander, and a navel-component commander will also be assigned."

"Forces?" I asked warily

"The remainder of your company will serve as a foundation for a new unit," Amanda said. "I'm reactivating the first squadron/fourth cavalry regiment as your personal command. A battalion of the _Kuronami_ will also be assigned. Armor will be provided by one of Colonel Stewart's Highland Borderers battalions, and another from the _Régiment de Hussards Parachutistes._ Plus the 2nd battalion, 11th Marine Artillery."

That was…not a small force. Two 'mech battalions, depending on how the Quarterhorse mustered the number of mechs could equal nearly three battalions or more. The Highlanders were technically mercs, though they'd been in the employ of the Capellan Federation since God-knows when and had taken leave to fight against Amaris. They didn't have _Hexapuma_s, but their equipment was nothing to sneer at, and the RHP had a number of rough field-capable aerodynes that made them light-weight air-mobile armor which had the potential to be really useful. Plus a mixed battery of artillery with both tubes and missiles, as well as an air-defense section.

A heavy ground force indeed.

"…upgraded as much as possible in the next month," General Carson said, drawing my attention back to the briefing. "In fact, the rebuild has already started. _Vulcan_ has already had a chance to analyze captured examples of the Clan's ferro-fib armor and figured out how they make it. It's bulkier than ours, though half that of the type used in the few House units that have the stuff which is essentialy old Royal-quality. It'll take time and resource to spin up a new plant, but in the end _Vulcan_ thinks it can produce the stuff quicker than it can ours or the old stuff.

"You're also going to get a heavy company of mobile infantry, three platoons of _blackhawks_ plus the usual scouting elements and a mixed heavy platoon of _voidhawks_ and _aquahawks_. A Marine littoral combat demi-battalion will provide you with an aquatic combat element."

"A reinforced regiment," I said, depending on air units assigned it was practically a combined-arms brigade. "But I only have direct command of the Quarterhorse?"

"No, you will have command your cavalry squadron, but also all planetary operations. Liz will be in over-all command, and ride along on the ground. A person appointed by Admiral Murakama will command the naval component," Amanda said.

I got that, sort of. While I had been trashing Amaris' forces from one side of the known galaxy to the other, Liz had been embroiled in a nasty guerilla war. She had the rank of Colonel, but realistically didn't have the experience to command something like this. But then…

"Ma'am, with all respect," I said, the formal tones telling both of them what I really thought, but then I went ahead and said it anyway. "The most I've ever commanded was a cavalry battalion, and that only for the last year or so of the Terra campaign. Now you're talking about tanks troops, which I've never been or commanded, artillery, Marines…"

"We simply don't have that many combined-arms units available," General Carson said frankly. "A stand-up fight with the woofies isn't something we can win. Not against units of equal mass, and especially since most of our units _aren't_ pure 'mech units. Even with mechs we have problems. We're faster because of the Helium-3 plants and advanced myomers, and able to fit more in because our core systems—engines, armor, and skeletal structures—are less bulky. They, however, carry as much armor as we do, and their lasers and missile-launchers are considerably better than ours.

"We _have_ to exploit our strengths, which are also their weaknesses. We have to be mobile, we have to use the Marines effectively, and we have to exploit the advantages of a true combined-arms doctrine. Their advantages in energy weapons go too far in negating our customary advantages in mobility, and they don't seem to have _any_ conventional armor force."

"Escort and transports?" I asked. "The Nessies?"

"The Nessie frigate/destroyer squadron is providing escorts for their carriers. The Falcons have a heavy warship component so your task group is going to have a heavy escort. _Surprise_ and _Orkid_ from the Nessies, assuming their weapons come back as expected. Currently they are limited to just their defensive weapon suites. Plus _Moon_ and _Phillips_. _Moon_ is going to swap out its normal dropships for a pair of _Ark Royal_'s aerospace carriers."

"That's a tidy little fleet," I said. _Phillips_ and _Moon_ were both custom variants of the _Lola III_ and _Riga_ classes respectively, that had been purpose-built as escorts for the First Lord and his family. Most of the _Rigas_ had left service well before the coup, and a lot had been reactivated from SLDF yards when the navy-side's voracious appetite for warships became obvious. The Black Watch _Riga_ rebuild, however, had stayed in service. Both class-rebuilds were fast, high-tech, and very heavily armed and armored in comparison to their lesser brethren although the _Wodehouse _-variant of the _Lola III_ had been somewhat unluckily named for admirals who had gone down with their flagships. As for the Nessies,_ Surprise_ was a cruiser and _Orkid_ was another destroyer, both again, heavily armed.

"It should be enough firepower to smash any single or two-some you run across, but if you get the attention of the Falcon's fleet it won't be nearly enough," Carson said. "You'll evade, get the warning out to us, and allow yourself to be shadowed until you can lead them into a trap of our choosing. Destroying their fleet, however, is a purely secondary objective.

"A full briefing will be ready when you get back," he said before I could say anything else.

But there _were_ two points, one that was very problematical. "Sir, I don't have the seniority for what you are proposing."

"You're being brevetted to Lieutenant Colonel," Carson said. "That's rank enough for command of a cav-squadron and to advise Colonel Hazen. I assure you, there will be no problem from the other commanders." He very carefully did _not_ look at Amanda or her brother. "Is there anything else?"

A brevet wasn't the kind of think a person could reject out of hand. Well, you _could_, but the Cav felt that if a person felt he wasn't ready then that person was likely correct. I wouldn't get it…and it was highly unlikely I'd ever get an assignment worth a damn again. Not even Amanda could swing that.

"Just one, sir. What are we calling it?"

He smirked. "Operation Ghost Rider."


End file.
